Each year in the United States, about 1.3 million women enter menopause, which signals the end of their reproductive stage. Unfortunately, the inability to have children is really only the tip of the iceberg for most women, as this hormonal shift can cast a wide net over a woman’s life, including her sex life.
We want you to know that there are solutions if you’re among the millions of women who are dealing with vaginal health issues after menopause, such as vaginal dryness or thinning vaginal tissues.
Here at Women’s Wellness MD, OB/GYN Dr. Chetanna Okasi and her team help women through every stage of their lives, including menopause. We understand that your sex life is an essential piece of your overall wellness puzzle, so we want to spend some time discussing vaginal health issues in post-menopause and how we can help.
For quite some time, the side effects of menopause weren’t fully understood and appreciated. These days, women are finally understood as there is more research in the area of menopause.
One of the results of this renewed focus is a new term that encompasses some of the more significant physical changes occurring after menopause that can impact your vaginal, sexual, and urinary health — genitourinary syndrome of menopause (GSM).
Included in this category are two considerable issues that post-menopausal women face:
1) Vaginal dryness, which affects more than half of women between the ages of 51 and 60; and 2) Vaginal atrophy, which affects about half of women after menopause.
Now, let’s explore why these issues develop after menopause. The primary driver of menopause is the shutting down of your ovaries, which means they won’t release any more eggs or produce any more estrogen.
While your estrogen hormones were primarily in charge of ovulation, they also helped to maintain the health of your vaginal tissue to encourage intercourse and to ease childbirth.
Now that you’re exiting your reproductive stage, biology shuts all this down, leaving you with GSM issues like vaginal dryness and thinning vaginal walls, both of which can make sexual intercourse uncomfortable, if not downright painful.
Given what we just learned about the impact of estrogen on your vaginal health, it makes sense that hormone therapy is a great solution.
We offer several different types of hormone therapies, such as:
We typically recommend more localized treatments, such as vaginal creams, if GSM symptoms are all you’re dealing with. If, however, you want to address a wide range of menopause symptoms, such as hot flashes, bone loss, and sexual health, a more systemic approach like BHRT may make more sense.
A great place to start improving the sexual aspect of your wellness puzzle is to sit down with Dr. Osaki to determine what works best for you. To start, we invite you to contact us at one of our locations in Columbia or Greenbelt, Maryland, to schedule an appointment today.
