Autistic Menopause

Why menopause is harder for autistic people doesn't have a simple answer, I discovered after reading your book.

So let's start with what factors influence the way a person experiences menopause?

Hmm.

So lots of factors do.

I think quite a big thing that we talk about in the book is a person's past life experiences.

So all kinds of factors such as your ethnicity, your socioeconomic status, so how well off you are, how educated you are, all these kinds of things, as well as your genetics, these also influence how you experience menopause.

But quite a few of these factors seem to affect menopause because they are related to stress.

So for instance... ethnicity.

So if you're someone with a minority ethnic background, you often encounter more disadvantages in life and more inequality.

And likewise, if you're someone who has experienced sort of stress in life, both of these things, so kind of being minoritized and experiencing inequality and experiencing kind of lifetime stress, these things age your body and your brain.

And that means that on average, not everyone, but on average, people with a history of kind of lifetime stress, minoritization, they will often enter menopause slightly earlier than and maybe have slightly more severe symptoms.

But it's a really complex picture, as I mentioned, because you've also got genetics at play.

So how people in your family, kind of what age they were when they entered menopause and so forth, those things will make a difference too.

And that's why there's no kind of, we can't predict what it will be like for every one person because there's so many factors at play.

I see.

Do autistic traits, our abilities, our symptoms, do those change with menopause? That's

what we find in our studies.

So we talk in our book about there being something of a two-way relationship where being autistic or ADHD affects how you experience menopause and But going through menopause also affects how you experience your autism or your ADHD.

So the way they experience their autism or their ADHD can change at menopause.

So sometimes people will develop new sensory sensitivities or they might experience changes, say, in their attention spans.

So maybe if they were someone, they were an ADHDer, they might find that their attention is even harder to control and they're more hyperactive than they were before.

They might also find their emotions are harder to regulate.

So it's this two-way street where being neurodivergent can affect how you experience the kind of classic menopause symptoms like hot flushes.

Being menopausal can also affect how you experience your autism or your ADHD.

Well, when a person experiences these changes during menopause, and let's take brain fog as an example, do those changes resolve themselves once a person is post-menopausal? Is there any improvement that happens?