How do your perimenopause symptoms compare to other women’s? This new tool will reveal all
There may have been a lot more conversations about menopause in the last five years but many midlife women still find it hard to pinpoint, let alone address, their symptoms. Are you shattered, angry and headachey because you’re working full-time, running a house and looking after your children and elderly parents? Or are those health issues connected to menopause? Often it’s hard to tell – and we simply don’t have the time or energy to get to the bottom of it all.
So we were interested in this new tool that helps you recognize menopause symptoms and encourages you to address them. And we were particularly interested in the fact that it’s a new launch from Zoe, the personalized diet programme followed by over 100,000 Brits, that counts Davina McCall as an ambassador. The fact that it conducts such huge studies collecting vast amounts of health data, makes for reassuring levels of insight. It has been a busy year for the brand so far: Zoe’s gut health drink hit the shelves of M&S Food in January, with their first supplement, the Zoe Daily30+ arriving in June.
And now there’s an online menopause symptom calculator, Menoscale, which I’m pleased to report is completely free and accessible to all women. You don’t need to be a £25-per-month Zoe app member to try it, you simply log on to the Zoe website and spend two minutes answering questions about your symptoms. You’re then given a score and told how your results compare to the 70,000 other women who’ve already tested the tool and who are within your age demographic.
“The fact that you can improve your menopause experience through food is incredible,” says Davina McCall. “Women are desperate for solutions, and this research is crucial in helping to provide them.”
The idea is that, as a perimenopausal or postmenopausal woman, which can be quite an isolating time in life, you can benchmark the impact of your symptoms against other women and use that information as a starting point to address those issues. You can take your results to a GP appointment, for example, or make tweaks to your diet that they suggest. “When women have spoken up about the challenges of mid-life, they have been broadly overlooked. With this new tool, developed by our female scientists, women can have agency again when discussing their health,” says Zoe founder Professor Tim Spector.
Kerry and the Zoe Menoscale calculator
How does Zoe’s Menoscale work?
You take the online quiz and answer 20 questions about the most common menopause symptoms, such as hot flushes, mood swings and sleep problems, logging the impact each one has on your life, on a scale of 0 (no impact) to 5 (an extreme impact).
This generates a score out of 100 - the higher the score, the more you are affected. It then compares the impact of your symptoms with 70,000 other women of the same age who tested the tool’s prototype.
You can then use this score how you wish. It may, for example, simply raise your personal awareness of the menopause process and/or confirm a suspicion that your various health niggles may be part of this change. It may provide a nudge for you to seek advice from a healthcare professional or to do some research of your own. It may be the catalyst for you making lifestyle changes.
What is the link between diet and menopause symptoms?
Given Zoe’s philosophy – that tweaking your diet to optimize your gut microbiome is the most powerful personal tool to improve health – it’s no surprise that the team is focusing here on the links between nutrition and menopause symptoms.
Zoe’s latest research makes this connection explicit. As mentioned, it used a prototype of Menoscale to track the menopause symptoms of 70,000 women. Around 4,000 of these women then followed Zoe’s dietary advice for an average of six-and-a-half months. The results were striking: perimenopausal women logged an average reduction in their symptoms of 30 per cent, while post-menopausal women found theirs dropped by 37 per cent.
The psychological issues that were most improved by diet tweaks: mood swings, anxiety and depression decreased by 35 percent for perimenopausal women and 44 per cent for postmenopausal ones.
If you’re interested in exploring this link further, Zoe’s Dr Federica Amati, a nutritional scientist, spoke to GTG about how your diet can affect your menopause age and symptoms. Her book Recipes For A Better Menopause, £19.59, is well worth putting on your To Read list.
Zoe Menoscale menopause calculator
Zoe Menoscale: our verdict
I’m 48, which places me squarely within prime perimenopausal territory, and started taking HRT six months ago. Prior to having that conversation with my doctor, it had taken me a while to join the dots between my various health niggles and unpick what exactly was menopause related and what might be attributed to the usual stresses of juggling a million things in midlife.
I was experiencing brain fog – I’d lose track of what I was trying to say in the middle of a sentence, which frightened me as I was about to start a daunting new job as a university lecturer. I had relentless three-day headaches around the start of my cycle. And I was experiencing so much joint pain that I was considering giving up running (and I love running.) Half a year on and HRT has been a game-changer for me, hugely reducing those issues.
The Menoscale is a doddle to use – it’s well designed, simple to navigate and it took me a couple of minutes to answer the 20 questions, before it calculated my score.
I got 5/100, which was hugely reassuring. (The lower the better, remember.) Other women in my age range (46-50 years), it told me, have an average score of 31. Of my three main symptoms, my (now much milder) joint pain and occasional rough night’s sleep are in-line with my cohort, while my (slight) weight gain is a bit less of an issue than it is for others.
This confirms to me that HRT has been a good move – my score would’ve been a lot higher six months ago. And having cleaned up my diet recently after a doctor very gently pointed out I was getting tubby around the middle, it has also encouraged me to continue binning off the biscuits.
Basically, I feel pretty good at the moment and in control of my peri symptoms, and the Menoscale validated this. I doubt I’ll ever get to zero – I’m not the Bionic Woman – but I’m happy with where I’m currently sitting (and I don’t think getting to zero is the point to be honest, but I’m very competitive!).
Let’s be clear: this is a marketing tool to nudge you towards signing up for the Zoe programme, to receive personalised dietary advice. But it’s a useful one and there’s no obligation to buy. And kudos to high-profile companies who are investing heavily in menopause research – after years of being ignored, midlife women need all the support they can get.