Menopause Brain Fog ….. A New Way To Reduce It

OCTOBER 4, 2013 BY MICKEY HARPAZ

Sometimes I feel so stupid and frustrated

Does menopause brain fog make you feel stupid? Does it sometimes frustrate you beyond belief? Do you worry that brain fog will be with you permanently?

If you are concerned about your brain fog, there is good news. A new medical study has found a way to reduce your brain fog.

Research reveals that two out of three women experience menopause brain fog, but brain fog means different things to different women. Menopause brain fog may be described as feelings of mental confusion or lack of mental clarity. It is called brain fog because it can feel like a cloud that reduces your ability to think clearly. Here are common brain fog experiences

• brain freeze – difficulty recalling words, names, addresses, phone numbers etc … that you know very well. Very often it feels like the information is “just out of reach” or “on the tip of my tongue”
• memory lapses – difficulty recalling recent events
• forgetfullness – cant remember where you left something …. could be a car, phone, glasses, keys etc
• impaired concentration – thoughts wander a great deal making it difficult to do a task. This makes learning difficult as well
• impaired thinking – cant think clearly. Sometimes described as feeling “woolly” in the head

You may attribute your menopause brain fog, like your other menopause symptoms, to thechanging levels of estrogen and progesterone in your body ….. and generally speaking this is true. This disturbs the balance between all the hormones in your body.

The hormone that particular affects the performance of your brain is testosterone. It may surprise you to know that men don’t have a monopoly on testosterone. Your ovaries
produce testosterone, as well as estrogen and progesterone, but the quantity of testosterone in your body is much less than the quantity in a man’s body.

The amount of testosterone produced by your ovaries, peaked around the time you were 20 years old. Since then it has been falling. Now the level of testosterone in your body is around 50% of what it was when you were 20.

After menopause, when hormones return to a more balanced state, most women experience a natural return of cognitive abilities to their pre-menopause levels. However this could take 10 – 20 years. If menopause brain fog isnt really troubling you, you may find it acceptable just to wait for post-menopause for your cognitive abilities to return.

However, if menopause brain fog is troubling you, there is something you can do now to help “normalize” your cognitive abilities. The new medical study found that women on testosterone therapy showed a significant improvement in verbal learning and memory, by applying small daily doses of testosterone gel to the upper arm.

This study is particularly important, because it is the first large, placebo controlled, study of its kind to substantiate an improvement in cognitive abilities from testosterone therapy. In the past, small studies have found that testosterone improved the cognitive functioning of menopausal women, but these studies were not placebo controlled.

Testosterone treatment for women is approved in Europe. However, testosterone treatment for women hasn’t been approved in either the U.S. or Canada, so it has to be prescribed “off-label.” That means either the physician prescribes an FDA-approved male pharmaceutical product in very small doses (usually about one-tenth of dose recommended for men) or the hormone has to be compounded specially by a pharmacist.