To think the menopause makes no sense evolutionarily speaking

[CurdinHenry]

Sure maybe it makes sense that women evolve into a new phase of wisdom and a role that's different from child having and of that. But how come we all seem to run out of the basic chemicals needed to keep our pelvic floor from collapsing? How can we be evolved to be almost certain to get very unwell across time (in our longer years on this planet) if we don't take supplements that have only existed for less than 100 years????

Feel a bit stressed about it.

You’re lucky. Definitely menopause related symptoms in my case. Thankfully back to normal with HRT.

Menopause gave humans an evolutionary advantage. Experienced mothers with no young of their own, able to help their daughters with their offspring.

Interesting theory but while I agree modern life is stressful, looking at it in the context of wars, plagues, famines, infant and postnatal mortality, the appalling treatment of women as chattel, lack of technology or healthcare, historically this is a pretty nice time to be alive.

That's the theory but there were many families where mothers were still having babies at an advanced age while they had grown up families eg my Great Grandmother. Her eldest children were in their 20s and she was still having babies in her 40s. 11 children in total.

A while back (possibly a Monkey Cage) a scientist noted that if humans wanted to extend their lifespan, then a regime of slowly delaying child bearing - say not giving birth before the age of 30 - would extend longevity.

We aren’t supposed to live this long, there’s no biological reason for women to live beyond their reproductive years.

I think it's linked to the reason men are interested in sex so late in life despite having a floppy tool. Generally, 100+ years ago, by the time they hit 50ish, they'd have been dead either due to poor health or through war or intense physical work. Nature didn't have to evolve a way to run down the penis while still maintaining the ability to pee.

There may be no intelligent design behind evolution but nature is very clever nonetheless when you look at wildlife and how it operates. Some animals and plants are so resourceful.

Others less so, like the tansy beetle and koalas - and I think we would have been better as marsupials, too, or at least been fitted with a zip to get babies out.

We have oestrogen receptors in every cell in our body so once we go through menopause the cells look for the oestrogen and obviously don't get it, or only low levels. But I've also recently seen something on Facebook that could be rubbish, but also sounded plausible, that we make a low level of oestrogen in all those cells and maybe the reason some women go through menopause with fewer problems is because that process is more efficient.

There may be no intelligent design behind evolution but nature is very clever nonetheless when you look at wildlife and how it operates. Some animals and plants are so resourceful.

Or it's an emergent property of chemistry. (Like leopards spots)

Unfortunately, with only one exemplar, we can't say.

E2A:Spelling

There's still time, my mum got a prolapse in her 80s. Sorry.

I am one of the 85% I didn’t say that menopause hadn’t affected me, I said I wasn’t ’very unwell’ I think the majority of women are not ‘very unwell’.

And I do have experience of being very unwell having gone through stage 3 bowel cancer. Following that I had to have a hysterectomy and oophorectomy due to a genetic condition with a high risk of gynaecological cancers.

The body get estrogen from fat cells. Also it is produced by the adrenal glands after meno. So if you are too thin and/or too stressed, that may make a difference, perhaps? Or not. Either way, we still do have levels of estrogen, suitable for our postreproductive lives.

I am also one of the vast majority of women who do not report devastating transitions.

The breakdown changes, depending who you read. It used to be 25% have no symptoms, or none that they notice; 50% have manageable or not particularly disruptive symptoms; 25% have severe symptoms.

All you hear about is the 25%, so younger women assume that is "the menopause".

If you mention the other 75%, the 25% women get very angry. God knows why. It doesn't diminish their experience to say not everyone has a single hot flush, night sweats, etc etc etc (there are scores now of symptoms listed) let alone debilitating levels of disruption, which some women certainly do.

I had a dreadful menopause that lasted 12 years despite fitness, healthy eating and normal BMI. I had a hysterectomy at 40, menopause started at 50, no pelvic floor problems, just endless hot flushes, insomnia, mood swings. I was unlucky in that I was the age group that was denied HRT after the faulty American research. My mother also had a long and difficult menopause. When the Menopause Matters website started it was hugely helpful, after the smug people who told you that menopause was easy.

I really wouldn’t mind menopause- no longer being able to get pregnant, no periods etc- if it was like a switch being flipped. No excess sweating, no heavy periods, no mood swings, no worrying you’re growing facial hair and apparently no pissing yourself (that one hadn’t even crossed my mind ffs).

Not all women need supplements and medication to get through and beyond menopause. Our ancestors would have eaten and slept better than us, and had generally more active lifestyles, which would all help to minimise symptoms that we now treat. If we hadn’t died of
something else we now vaccinate against, or can treat with antibiotics or other other modern medicine /procedures.

I can count on one hand the number of hot flushes/night sweats I had. However my mental symptoms were awful, terrible mood swings, brain fog and my self esteem, always a bit fragile,went down the toilet.

If you’ve had an easy time both mentally and physically then you ARE lucky.

Average life expectancy between 1600 and 1800 was between 35 - 40 years. This is distorted by child mortality but if you survived to 25 you probably would live to your early 50s. There were some who survived to 60s or 70s but this was the exception rather than the rule really. You were far more likely to die in child birth than suffer from issues relating to menopause. To put it bluntly. And that's if you made it as far as getting pregnant in the first place.

The industrial and farming revolutions changed this - we could support a larger population with food and more food meant people were naturally able to survive illness if they got it because their bodies had slightly more resilience. This also coincided with advances in medicine to where we are today.

So we have had tens of thousands of years of human evolution but only 200 years - at best - where our life expectancy has been above the age of menopause.

In my family I have a couple of family lines where this equates to just four/five generations. One of my great great grandparents was born in 1820 (and my mum is still alive).

It's actually a really scary thing to think about and whilst many people are talking about the doom and gloom of our era, it's worth reflecting on.

So we have had tens of thousands of years of human evolution but only 200 years - at best - where our life expectancy has been above the age of menopause.

If this was the case, why did various governments bring in old age pensions?
Why did so many of the greats we know of live into their 70s, 80s, and 90s, as can be easily seen by a quick look at their wiki page? Perhaps the average farm labourer didn't make old bones, but people of both sexes have been regularly living into much older age than menopause since recorded history began.

But we would also have already done that job and probably helped with our grandchildren's education too by the time of menopause. Women had babies very soon after they became able to because that's what a girl was "for". Menstruation is simply to allow us to have children. That's its sole purpose. So you would have already brought up your kids and become a grandmother by about 30. It's also possible that you and your daughters would be producing babies at the same time. But then menopause would happen to protect you from pregnancies that might harm or even kill you. However long you lived after that was immaterial. You had fulfilled your purpose.

Probably because everyone is living longer and in the distant past women died at around menopause age so didn’t have to cope with all the BS it comes with!!!

I'm sure my Great Granny with her 10 children living in a small fisherman's cottage didn't live a healthier life than me. She would certainly have been active although not necessarily in a good way. Most of her children developed
arteriosclerosis due to malnourishment as children. This was a disease often found in fishing communities. There's a great deal of sentimentality associated with the good old days when the reality for many of my ancestors were working down pits and barely existing in fishing communities.

Menopause and periods are affected by modern lifestyles.

Periods in a "wild" human who did full term natural weaning would likely not return significantly between pregnancies, because the mother wouldn't be having the excess nutrition we have to support them. Babies were more commonly spaced 3-4 years apart, because a woman breastfeeding in the wild simply wouldn't be having the period cycle needed to become fertile again. From an evolutionary standpoint, this ensured raising the first child until it was basically safe enough to survive. So a woman might have 3-5 children between the ages of 16-35, with a little "natural wastage" caused by the lack of sanitation and medicine. Follow that with up to 3-5 years of breastfeeding (and your youngest girl being fertile probably) and you're looking at almost hitting menopause.

There's simply no point comparing our biology exactly with cavepeople because they lived the lives our physical evolution designed for us. High fibre, physically active, outdoors, few intoxicants...