MENOPAUSE VAGINAL DRYNESS

Yesterday I blogged about various early menopause symptoms. One of the most common, in fact it affects about 80% of perimenopausal,menopausal and postmenopausal woman, is menopause vaginal dryness.

If you haven't had any menopause vaginal dryness then you may think it isn't such a big thing. It is! It can be quite awful in fact. Not only does it often ruin sexual intercourse, but vaginal dryness is often accompanied by a pretty severe itch.

So what causes menopause vaginal dryness? Every vagina is kept moist by a range of mucus membranes that sit at the opening of the uterus. Estrogen helps your body produce lubricant. Which in turn keeps the vagina, not only moist, but supple as well.

Now that explains why during menopause you may experience vaginal dryness due to a drop in Estrogen. But why the itch? While the mucus membranes produce lubricant to prevent vaginal dryness, they do a second, even more important job of making that lubricant slightly acidic! The slight acidity acts to protect the vagina from any foreign bacteria. Hence no infection can set in.

Obviously during perimenopause, menopause and postmenopause Estrogen levels have dropped, hence the vaginal dryness and the lack of acidity. So we itch on occassion. This drop in acidity not only causes a nasty itchy but can increase the risk of a urinary tract infection.

But the good news in respect of menopause related vaginal dryness is that there are remedies that can allievate the symptoms, and if used regularly can help with both menopause vaginal dryness and the onset of infections related to it. I'd like to share some of these remedies with you in a later blog post.