Ethnic And Cultural Issues - Menopause And Your Life: Menopause Managing The Change Of Life
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Ethnic and cultural issues
Social and emotional responses to menopause vary, depending on a woman's cultural values. She may live in a culture in which women are valued primarily for their ability to have children. Or her culture may equate beauty exclusively with youth. If so, menopause may take a substantial emotional toll. If, on the other hand, her culture values the experience and wisdom that come with aging, she may feel relief and exhilaration at menopause.
Women from different racial and ethnic backgrounds experience menopause differently. Hispanic and African American women tend to go through menopause slightly earlier, whereas Asian American women tend to be slightly older when they reach menopause. And while only 25% of African American women think of menopause as problematic, about 50% of white women see it that way. African American women have more hot flashes than white women, but tend to view them as a normal part of aging that will subside in time. Different cultures have different views of aging, but it's helpful to regard menopause as a natural stage in a woman's life cycle.
Table 1: Reproductive agingIt may be said that women live three lives: childhood, the reproductive years, and postmenopause. Experts in women's health and aging have put forth the concept that these are part of an ongoing physiological process that they call "reproductive aging." Simply put, reproductive aging is what happens to the ovaries and other reproductive organs as women age. In July 2001, a group of 27 experts in aging and women's health met in Park City, Utah, for the Stages of Reproductive Aging Workshop (STRAW). Their goal was to describe this process in greater detail. To do this, they divided the process into seven stages, beginning with the early years of the menstrual cycle and continuing for the remainder of a woman's life. All seven stages describe in simple terms what happens to menstrual cycles and levels of follicle-stimulating hormone as a woman ages. The staging system doesn't specifically outline when and to what levels estrogen and other reproductive hormones decline because these changes are extremely variable among individual women. Experts emphasize that not all healthy women will follow these stages sequentially — some women may skip some of the stages — and the age range during which they occur can vary widely. What is the point of this staging system? Eventually, experts hope it will help women and their physicians determine where in the reproductive aging process a woman is so that appropriate care can be given. Besides helping to improve medical care for midlife women, experts hope the staging system will help direct biomedical researchers to fill in many of the current knowledge gaps about menopause.
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| Last updated: | August 13, 2007 |
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Medical content reviewed by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School. Harvard Health Publications, Copyright © 2007 by President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Used with permission of StayWell.
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