Male menopause - an inaccurate term for a real condition.
People usually associate the term menopause with the well-defined, relatively short period in a woman’s life when ovulation ends and sex hormone production essentially stops. In fact, women are quite familiar with symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats, headaches, insomnia, mood swings, fatigue and decreased libido that are associated with the fairly rapid plunge in hormone levels during perimenopause.
But women aren’t the only ones who suffer from symptoms caused by a decline in hormone levels. As men age, their bodies produce less of the male sex hormone testosterone, causing some men to experience symptoms similar to those reported by women during perimenopause. Low testosterone levels, or hypogonadism, represent one of several possible causes of symptoms.
Unlike in women, sex hormone levels decline far more gradually in men, and the testes do not cease production of testosterone all together. Right around the year 2000, physicians began to notice that an increasing number of their male patients complained about a number of the same symptoms faced by women in the period leading up to menopause. The awareness of these symptoms grew rapidly within the medical community, causing the emergence of the ill-fitting term, male menopause. Read more…
