Oprah had a recent panel about menopause, with Maria Shriver, medical experts and Drew Barrymore. Drew talked about how she wants to change the stigma around menopause while dating. I don’t really speak Drew and find her annoying, but Hecate covered that story well. Oprah said she’d had heart palpitations at 48 and consulted multiple doctors. Doctors told Oprah at the time that the symptoms were idiopathic and put her on cardiac medication. It turns out that heart palpitations are a symptom of perimenopause and that up to 40% of women have them. The fact that even the ritzy doctors Oprah sees didn’t realize this speaks to the lack of knowledge of women’s health.
Oprah Winfrey knows from personal experience that perimenopause and menopause can interrupt a woman’s life.
When she was 48, she stopped sleeping well and started experiencing intense heart palpitations. Frightened, she went to five different doctors, including a cardiologist who gave her an angiogram. Doctors put her on heart medication, though they had no explanation for her symptoms — not one of them mentioned perimenopause or menopause as a possible cause, although as many as 40% of women can experience palpitations as a symptom.
When she stumbled upon the book The Wisdom of Menopause by Dr. Christiane Northrup, she finally understood her distressing symptoms. The discovery encouraged her to do several shows about it, making her one of the first media personalities to talk openly about the topic.
Winfrey is continuing to educate women about menopause in her latest “The Life You Want” class on Oprahdaily.com. She invited Maria Shriver, Drew Barrymore and Gayle King as well as doctors Sharon Malone and Heather Hirsch to discuss, share and openly ask questions about The Big M to kick off Oprah Daily’s new guide to menopause.
“I wasn’t vibrant. My whole world dulled down a couple of notches,” she says. But after she started hormone replacement therapy, (HRT) she says, “I got my first click of estrogen and I was like, the sky is bluer!”
“I would have been headed for depression if I had not been on estrogen,” Oprah says. Mental health symptoms, loss of concentration, heavy bleeding, weight gain and even joint pain are some of the more than 30 lesser-known perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms.
I had no idea that low hormone levels can cause heart palpitations and am glad to cover this story to get the word out. I haven’t had heart palpitations or insomnia, knock wood. The main symptom I have is general grumpiness, which is hard to tell apart from my personality. I also take less sh-t from people and do what I like so there’s an upside too. Overall I’ve noticed that things just feel “wrong” in general, like there’s something off. I also have a lot of knee pain! That’s another thing I learned from this article. I thought I was just twerking too much at Zumba but I definitely should consider hormone replacement. I’ll talk to my doctor about that.
Shit, this is me! I though it might have been long covid, but yeah, perimenopause makes sense.
Forever grateful to Drew to speak up.
Me too! I had a check-up last year and they sent me to a cardiologist who put me on a heart monitor for 5 days! I had an EKG and ultrasound only to find out there’s nothing “really wrong” with my heart. At NO time did they suggest my age (48) or peri was maybe a factor. It cost me $500 in out of pocket co-pays and I was kind of mad. I’m so happy to have this article!
Same, 43, two weeks of that itchy monitor I had to pay for out-of-pocket. Then to the cardiologist for a heart scan. Never found a reason. Now I get them once in a while when it races which scares the crap outta me, then it stops and I am on my merry way again for months in-between. Thank you, Oprah, for being the one to finally tell us and our doctors what is normal for peri-menopausal symptoms.
Thank you for running these articles! The lack of understanding of menopause by doctors is so frustrating. Thanks to women sharing this information, at least we know enough to advocate for ourselves.
Dr Christiane Northrup is a goddess. Both her book and Dr Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain (hormonal changes and impacts on behaviour puberty through past menopause) opened my eyes to so much my GP’s didn’t know. It helped us with my teenage nieces and both my and my SIL’s peri-menopause/menopause.
The truth is Dr Northrup is a antivaxxer Qanon nut. Huge spreader of COVID misinformation. (Look it up)
It’s important to seek knowledge about menopause. But be careful who you consider to be a Goddess.
Northrup had long been an antivaxxer, but her views became more apocalyptic during the pandemic and after her boyfriend’s death. She has claimed vaccines are a Deep State plot, masks and 5G are evil, etc. Over the years, she transitioned from doing a lot of good and into dangerous fringe lunacy. It has made me crazy when the occasional highly trained medical person inveighs against masks in recent years. What’s next, demonizing gloves and autoclaves for infection control?
Yup! Northrup is pretty nuts. She managed to keep her crazy under the radar (and even said some good stuff occasionally) but since Covid she is not keeping her crazy under wraps at all.
I’m also highly skeptical of reading books that talk about differences between brains based on gender, because for the most part those theories have been completely debunked as they are based on really sh!tty science. They’re also used to keep up the “boys are good at math, girls are good at sewing and loving people” generalizations that try to keep women and girls in the home.
My apologies to OP if I’m sounding snarky, I’m really not meaning to. And if you got some really helpful and supportive info from that book, then I’m super happy for you! Maybe there are some great tidbits in there. I’m just really skeptical of differences in brain wiring based on binary sex assignment. I’ve been subjected to a lot of crap related to those theories, so I probably don’t realize where they can be helpful.
I didn’t know about Northrup’s antivax stance (getting my 5th booster today), goddess was a late night reference to someone shining a light on menopause which is under reseached, not to put her on a pedastal. Poor choice of words on my part.
The Female Brain is a book about the hormonal changes through out life impact females. It is well researched and is not a comparison between males and females.
I also found What Fresh Hell Is This by Heather Corinna to be very informative, useful, and funny.
When I went to start chemo for my immune cancer, my doctors unilaterally decided to take me off of HRT because there was a small chance of blood clots. I had to push back HARD to get them to explain themselves. The solution was to put me on blood thinners for the period I was on the chemo, no big deal. But the blasé attitude about throwing me back into menopause WHILE ALSO UNDERGOING CHEMO was infuriating. My main oncologist is still of child bearing age so she had no idea, and, of course, all the other doctors were male. Later on, my doctor noted that I was the only female patient she had that also wasn’t on antidepressants, and I had to remind her of the HRT and my battle to remain on it. All I can say is that you are truly on your own in advocating for yourself with doctors and that HRT has been a godsend for limiting the unneeded superfluous suffering in a life otherwise plenty filled with it!
If you start entering menopause early (I was in my late thirties) get yourself [genetically] tested for celiac disease. I came out of menopause about 5 years later when I went gluten-free, but no doctor I saw put 2 and 2 together on that one. I’m in peri menopause years later again, and feel so much better and healthier than the first time round.
I’ve started following Dr. Jen Gunter as well, I’m 39 but apparently it’s not too early to keep it in mind if you experience weird symptoms. I just want to be prepared and be able to advocate for myself when the time comes because god knows it could be a second full-time job.
Definitely who to follow. She is not an antivaxer
I just put in for her book at my library.
I had Lyme a few years ago that sort of kick started me into perimenopause, and gave me physical anxiety attacks that feel like heart palpitations, fun. It’s all hitting at once! :O
Women’s health, especially menopause, is so under funded and under researched, and under discussed. Thanks for posting this article.
I’ve probably been perimenopausal for 5 years or so? At the beginning, I just had a lot of night sweats and issues sleeping. Nowadays, the heart palpitations with hot flashes happen once or twice a week. It’s a fun time and goes along nicely with the flooding periods (fibroids, although I do have effective treatment and can get that med from overseas inexpensively). Right now, it’s a fun time because sometimes I’ll skip 2-3 months in a cycle and I get hopeful that this sh!t is ending, and then I’ll go back to every 30 days for a couple of months and I just never know! I’m 54, and I’d like to think this will end soon!
It’s more disconcerting that MDs don’t seem to know (or care) much about perimenopause and menopause, much less effective treatment. Dr. Christiane Northrup’s book is quite helpful in lieu of my own MDs.
Thanks for sharing, ladies. It’s always nice to be able to compare/contrast with others!
What do you do to treat your fibroids?
I don’t treat the fibroids as much as I treat the heavy periods resulting from both fibroids and perimenopause. I use tranexamic acid, which essentially makes the first three days a normal period. I only use it for Days 2, 3, and 4. I buy it OTC in/from Europe (where I can get a year’s worth for about the same price as 1 month in the US) or mail order from Japan. My MD does at least understand THAT part and is supportive.
I could go have a hysterectomy, but haven’t because I was told this wasn’t going to be an issue once i was in menopause… for the most part, it’s quite manageable.
Thank you. I ask because there’s so little research done on fibroids–they just don’t care. It’s a myomectomy or hysterectomy in the US and it sucks. or Lupron, which is hit or miss and seems to have negatively impacted some. We really need more women and POC getting funding for women and POC problems.
Hey ThatsNotOkay just popping in to say, they actually do sometimes prescribe an IUD for hormone regulation to treat fibroids. I got mine surgically placed during a laparoscopic procedure to remove a chocolate cyst that had grown to the size of a baseball. If they haven’t offered you that, push and keep asking!
This is a hill I will gladly die on. We need tons more studies by women scientists and doctors for this part of our lives. Quite frankly men don’t understand and male dominated Western medicine doesn’t and has never studied women holistically. It’s up to us to keep talking and pressure our institutions and medical professionals to do the work. We must advocate for ourselves and one another. We are valuable and worth care at every stage of life ,damn it.
Word. I’m finally taking thyroid hormones and feel like a new me. My mother urged me to get checked for years because it’s a thing for the women in her family. I was hesitant because it seemed like half the women I know were suddenly diagnosed with hypothyroidism or Hashimoto’s. If you read up on it, there’s a lot of skepticism in the medical community whether it always needs treatment or why “suddenly” so many women have it.
Well. OR. Maybe it’s not new and we are only now realizing it’s a problem and it needs treatment. I was tired, I lost tons of hair, I was moody. All gone. I can only imagine how many women aren’t taken seriously with those symptoms. Luckily my GP is a woman and was on it immediately.
Sufferer of heart palpitations here….freaked me out when it started! My doctor kind of shrugged when I told him about it. I don’t understand why medical information and studying for half the population is so lackluster. Why do we have to hear this from celebrities or friends or family members who experienced it?
I went to my doctor because of nerve issues, it reminded me a lot of when I had lyme but the only indication that something was off was a low B12. They did x-rays of my neck and neurologist tests that all came back fine. My doctor then said eh it’s probably stress (which it wasn’t) Not even a question if my periods still were regular and I am at an age where a peri- menopause is normal. I couldn’t understand why B12 would be affected by stress so I asked for a gluten test which also came back as fine. When I started having hotflashes to the extent that it was impossible to sleep I went to a gynocologist . I mentioned my nerve issues and he told me that nerve issues and jointpain (which I also had had for a while) can ocurr when hormones start to change. I now take a B12 supplement prescribed by my doctor and hormones and feel a lot better but I need both.
Doctors need a lot more education on something that 50% of the population will go through at one point.
It sounds like you really advocated for yourself – so glad you did and that you’re feeling better!
I am convinced in the mean time that doctors don’t seem to know anything.
Even I already know that progesterone fluctuations cause arrhythmia or palpitations, and I’m not 40 yet (and not a dr)
I’ve stopped even asking my doctor(s) about menopause symptoms because all I ever get is a shrug and a note in my chart about my anxiety. The medical profession should be mortified that talk show hosts are doing the heavy lifting on this.
This! I was in my 30’s and having these problems and … nothing. Part of it was me because I tried to power through and didn’t understand what was going on. The heart palpitations, the excess sweating, the confusion. Periods that were like floods. I suffered needlessly and I hope that anyone who just feels off or is sure that something is wrong gets the medical help they need and deserve.
Cannot take hormones because they give me migraines (actually , they gave me a migraine that lasted 3 days and ended with me in the ER) and so that is a no. My doctor, who is female, just laughed and told me to get ready for a roller coaster ride. This was when I started looking for a new doctor.
How crazy (and frustrating) is it that I am getting better medical advice from a gossip site than my own doctors! I’m 52 and have been having heart palpitations for a couple of years. I mentioned it to my main Dr. and my gyno and they basically shrugged and had no answer for me. At no time was menopause given as a possible reason and I’ve been worried all this time about what it could be.
Also: stressed-out new moms! I was working as a prescribing pharmacist of Coumadin in a cardiology clinic when I started having them-my sons were 6 mos and 2 years old at the time-and my oh-so-knowledgable cardiology clinical pharmacist boss didn’t have a clue. It was my OB-GYN who put me on a low dose beta-blocker until things calmed down.
I had the same thing w the palpitations. This site is so helpful with these posts.
MD here-just want to give you a little medical perspective and say that it would be totally irresponsible for a doctor to simply chalk up ANY heart related symptoms to menopause without doing a full investigation.
there are extensive studies showing that women have heart attacks and heart disease nearly as often as men do, but their symptoms are different and often ignored or misattributed to “stress” “depression” “anxiety”, etc etc etc. Bravo to Oprah’s team for taking her condition seriously.
Maisie, that’s a great point
It would have been extremely helpful to me when I went through it if ANY of my doctors, HCP had said “you know, palpitations like these are often seen when women are going through peri-menopause. But just to be safe, I want to have you do these tests to rule out any cardiac issues in case something else is going on.”
Instead it was months and months of stress… waking up in the dead of night multiple times a week, including one time it was so bad I called an ambulance, then a serious of tests … ekg, 24 x 7 monitors, scans, finally some bloodwork showing some electrolytes were out of whack, each one followed by a shrug, “test was fine, no idea why that’s happening” never any mention of menopause, possible causes, concern for what I was experiencing… oh, and a lecture about diet and exercise because of my weight. And then me being hesitant to mention them again in appointments because I was starting to get “maybe you’re ‘just having a panic attack’” comments from HCPs, and not liking the it’s all in your silly little head vibe coming across. But knowing that however I was responding to the palpitations, my emotional response TO THEM wasn’t causing them.
Eventually it was a conversation with my aunt and a couple of other older relatives who said “oh, yeah, I had those too, it was awful, worse than the hot flashes” that led me to realize it was peri-menopause. Then some time spent with Dr Google, me developing coping strategies to just ride them out. Even after I’d made the connection, my doctor had no interest in addressing it at all or exploring what caused it. After ~ 18 months, they finally stopped.
I had two procedures to deal with fibroids and heavy, completely unmanageable bleeding.
The first was a uterine artery embolization. You can get more info here:
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/uterine-artery-embolization
Embolization basically cuts off the blood supply to the fibroids so that they shrink and die. I wasn’t a candidate for surgical removal of my fibroids as they were embedded in the uterine wall – removal risks creating holes in the uterus requiring a complete hysterotomy. Embolization is considered a minimally invasive alternative. Minimally invasive, but incredibly painful for a few days after the procedure. Also created a hormone flu for me. Not fun.
It worked to a certain extent, but did not fully address the heavy bleeding or flooding. A year later I had a uterine ablation, which removes a layer of the uterine lining (endometrium):
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/endometrial-ablation
There are mixed reviews on ablations, but it eventually worked for me. I bled heavily for weeks (maybe 7?0 and then continued to have rather heavy and painful periods, but eventually the ablation, likely combined with perimenopause, won out. I stopped having periods completely – the experience of many women after an ablation. I still had recognizable cycles, but no bleeding.
That’s my experience, but choices are always personal. Always do your research and have frank and informed conversations with your medical team.
I’ll add, though, that I do NOT miss the disruption of heavy periods. It was really only after that I realized how much I had to work around flooding and pain.
Good luck, everyone!
I am loving all the openness and conversation around these topics! I’m only in my mid-30s, but I’m eager to learn as much about perimenopause and menopause as I can before I get there.
I come from a long line of women who were poorly informed about what to expect from their bodies and didn’t know how to warn/educate their daughters, so essentiallyI went into puberty completely blind and every month was a horrible new surprise I had to figure out on my own. (The only conversation I got about menstruation was being handed a book and told “this should pretty much cover it”.) My mother did the best that she could with the tools she had and the parenting she’d received, but discussing one’s body and it’s functions wasn’t deemed appropriate.
I am determined to be more prepared than I was during the last time my body went through dramatic changes. If anyone has any books they’d recommend, I’d love to hear them!
Highly recommend a book called The Menopause Manifesto by Dr. Jen Gunter. She’s also worth a follow on Instagram, she’s constantly debunking myths about hormones, supplements, etc etc and separates fact (back up by scientific studies cited & sourced) from fiction. Really disappointed that Oprah lent her platform to an anti-vaxx/QAnon/conspiracy nutjob like Dr. Northrup. Ugh.
I started have heart palpitations a few years before I went through menopause. After menopause, everything quieted down for a year … and then went into overdrive. I also had hair loss, serious brain fog, dry skin (and also oily at the same time) and vocal fry out if the blue. I wrote all of my symptoms down, looked at the list, and thought “this is thyroid.” I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. About a year later, I was diagnosed with celiac disease. The two are related. A small dose of Synthroid daily made a huge difference with most symptoms disappearing within 2 weeks.
Every time I read about how amazing someone feels thanks to HRT it depresses me. I had breast cancer in my early 40s and cannot take hormones. I’d love to learn more about non HRT ways to see the sky as blue again. Is Oprah covering that too?
This is what made oprah famous. Her medical talks save lives.