Women’s health is different at every stage. What a woman needs to consider at age twenty-five will not be the same as a woman at age forty-five and age sixty-five. However, many women are guilty of treating their health care the same at every life stage, and many miss out on treatments, screenings, and preventative care they should be including as they age.
Knowing what to do for your health at every life stage and how to get the proper care makes all the difference. The challenge is that life stages do not come with a handbook, and often women only discover what they should have been tracking when something becomes an issue.
The Reproductive Stage of Life: Tracking Baselines
In a woman’s twenties and thirties, women’s health care pertains to various reproductive concerns. Contraception, fertility, and pregnancy are often top of mind during this stage of life. While this stage of life does deal with these issues, this is also the stage of life where women track baselines for their health that can be used later in life.
Routine pap smears, blood pressure history, thyroid levels, and bone density can all become markers later in life for women in their twenties and thirties. Many women skip these things because they feel good and don’t see the need to track anything. However, having these markers becomes a problem when hormones begin to shift later down the line.
This is also the stage where building a relationship with healthcare providers who understand comprehensive women’s health pays off. A Women’s Health Clinic that takes a longitudinal approach to care can track changes over time rather than treating each visit as an isolated event. This continuity matters more as health needs become more complex.
The Transition Period: Recognizing Changes
The changes that often affect sleep, mood, metabolic processes begin sometime around late thirties and early forties for women. While menopause may not have officially happened yet, many women experience a lengthy perimenopausal stage that can last years before anything “official” happens but is still symptomatic for many women.
The trouble is that symptoms of this time can be attributed to anxiety, stress, feeling overwhelmed or burnt out, and just simply getting older when this is often a host of hormonal changes that begin messing with weight gain, sleep cycles, periods, etc. It becomes more and more necessary to monitor symptoms as opposed to merely surviving them.
There is also a need to re-evaluate screening recommendations around this time for women in their forties. Screening recommendations vary from provider to provider, but many women in their forties must have a history of mammograms, blood pressure levels, thyroid levels, diabetes checks, etc. These are markers traditionally tracked for preventative care before cancer or diabetes develops as opposed to being a “nice to have.”
Menopause: Major Changes Ahead
Menopause itself is a major change women must account for in their care. Menopause is officially defined as the complete cessation of menstrual periods for a year (12 month timeframe). Following menopause (which can happen between ages 45-55), estrogen levels begin to decrease, and skin elasticity, vaginal health, bone density, and cognition all start to change. These changes should not only be acknowledged but also actively managed instead of passively accepted.
Menopausal symptoms can now be managed or prevented using various options never offered before. Hormone replacement therapies (HRT) are still developing, and there are now more options available than in the past, with ways to target the unique symptoms patients present rather than treating all symptoms the same.
Women should start getting their bone density checked starting around age sixty-five. Heart disease suddenly becomes an issue for older women after they spent their previous stages of life tracking other hormone-related issues.
Women also need to visit the doctor regularly after menopause as risk patterns for certain cancers also become different for older women. All the screenings women once needed now have somewhat of a different timeline (or less frequency) depending on their history levels tracked by their provider.
Breaking Care Down by Stage
One of the most frustrating things that happens for women regarding health care is that when they become care fragmented, the providers do not communicate about the same patient. A doctor treats a woman for her reproductive concerns while someone else treats her mental (or perhaps physical) concerns without tracking how these symptoms may relate to one another. Women with this unrelated care may feel like they are brushed off at various care appointments by several providers when they feel their symptoms are valid.
Women suffer from many issues when it should be recognized and hopefully treated with help. Women who follow a care plan that screens them for various ailments as they transition through life stages have better outcomes because they are more likely to pick up on anomalies if they know what to look for and what should be tracked regularly at various life stages.
Older women see fragmented care rather than holistic care monitoring all their previous hormone issues, which affects cancer risk patterns over time. Women’s health is dynamic. So is a woman’s body as she ages through life. Knowing what symptoms to monitor at every life stage helps personalize preventative care that older women often do not receive that can dramatically improve their outcomes across their lifespan.