I’d never seen an obvious link between heart health and menopause and World Menopause Day couldn’t have come sooner. With the theme this year being cardiovascular disease, it turns out this is a huge issue for menopausal women.

When we think of angina or heart problems, we tend to think of older men suffering from cardiac troubles, the subject seems completely unrelated to menopause; but it turns out there is a connection, a very strong one. Dr Tonye Wokoma explained to us on our latest Let’s all Talk Menopause webinar, how heart health affects us during menopause, what we can do to lower our chances of getting heart disease and what exactly does having heart disease mean. This session ultimately covers a massive gap in knowledge surrounding heart health during menopause; after all its not the first thing that pops into your head when you think of menopause.

“Find your voice”

The words of the Labour MP Carolyn Harris, talking at the Women In Work Summit that was held in London on Tuesday.

It was a fabulous conference discussing how menopause impacts women in the workplace.

Ms Harris said firms that are ‘meno washing’ or ignoring the menopause completely should be challenged. She told the audience that women should be shaming companies that don’t listen to their concerns.

Now, I can see some women being very concerned about their job security if they were to do that, but there are others ways to encourage change and they were discussed by this week’s guest, Dr Claire Kaye on ‘Let’s All Talk Menopause’.

We are surrounded by gut health and words like “healthy microbiome” but what does that mean? And more importantly, how does having a healthy gut affect our hormones? To answer our questions, we asked Dr Fionnuala Barton aka “The Menopause Medic” onto “Let’s all Talk Menopause” to answer our questions!

Dr Barton is a BMS registered menopause specialist & women’s health GP and is passionate about assisting women physically and emotionally through all stages of life. Thankfully she came armed with a mountain of knowledge on how to make our gut healthy during menopause. What’s more, she explained how having a healthy gut can help ease our menopause symptoms.

This session was two-fold; natural menopause, and surgically induced menopause. First she tackled surgical menopause and explained how it differed from natural; more often than not, surgical menopause symptoms are more severe and intense.

Just the words I wanted to hear when the fabulous Dr Naomi Potter joined us this week for a conversation about HRT. I love a good old chat about the menopause. It doesn’t matter how many discussions I have listened to on Let’s All Talk Menopause, I always learn something new and I am always grateful for the moment when I’m reassured that what’s happening is ‘normal’.

This week, I read about the actor Sarah Lancashire. I loved her performance in (Un)Happy Valley. That role saw her win the ‘Best Drama Performance’ at the National Television Awards this year. She has discussed her difficulties with the menopause and revealed how she struggles with brain fog. The articles also says she’s plagued by hot flushes and is considering a change in the type of HRT she uses.

Hello and welcome back to another series of Let’s all Talk Menopause, and the obvious starting point would be, of course, to give an introduction to the peri / menopause. And who better to do so than Dr Nighat Arif, a popular GP with over 15 years of experience in the NHS and private practice, specialising in women’s health and family planning. Plus, she is also now a popular television GP and social media star! So we were delighted she could join us during her busy schedule, to give us the A to Z on one of the most important stages of a woman’s life.