How Menopause and Hair Loss Go Together

Many of the symptoms of menopause are both physically and emotionally devastating. In fact, for a lot of women, the whole idea of menopause is devastating. It is an end to your ability to have children. For a number of women, it is the loss of everything that defined them as women. You have to deal with severe cramps, due mostly to declining estrogen levels and the resulting irregular periods. All of that erratic menstruation also causes strange period patterns, such as amazingly light flows or exceptionally heavy ones, periods that last for only a couple of days or for over a week, and the confusing of skipping them altogether some months.

You have mood swings, you run the risk of depression, and you are extremely irritable. You suffer through vaginal dryness, a complete lack of sexual desire, and insomnia coupled with fatigue. One of the worst things, however, because it is an outward, visible thing, is the fact that menopause and hair loss frequently go together. You can actually lose your hair, or see it growing dramatically thin, when you go through the big change of life.

Losing hair is emotionally painful at any time, whether you are a man or a woman. However, it is arguably much worse when you are a woman. This is because, to some extent, men are expected to lose their hair. Still, female pattern thinning is common among menopause women. Medically speaking, it is known as Androgenetic Alopecia. It is different, of course, from standard Alopecia because you are not losing all of your hair completely, eyelashes and eyebrows included. Menopausal women can also go through Alopecia Areata, which is a spotty type of hair loss.

Succinctly, however, hormones are at the root of this problem – no pun intended. And it is an extremely common problem. As many as 50 percent of women who are going through menopause experience hair loss or thinning. This makes sense, since 100 percent of menopause women suffer from the declination of estrogen being produced in their body. The main thing to realize here is that the lack of estrogen creates an imbalance with the small amount of testosterone every woman has. Testosterone is, of course, the culprit behind hair loss in men. That imbalance causes it to be the catalyst for hair loss in women as well.

Now, with the bad news out of the way, it has to be said that thinning hair is generally much more common than actual hair loss during menopause. At least, that is true for the majority of women. In fact, thinning hair should be expected. However, as you reach the stage of post menopause and your hormones finally begin to settle down and reach a more normal balance, that should definitely stop. One good way to tell if you are at risk for losing your hair is to consider what your close female relatives went through – your mother, sisters, and grandmothers. If they began losing their hair during menopause, there is a chance that you will as well.