One in ten NHS trusts have a ‘male menopause’ policy, but a QUARTER have no policy for women
One in ten hospitals has menopause guidelines for men, while a quarter have no policy for women, research shows.
The vigil protocols have been installed at around 20 trusts, despite the NHS describing the term as ‘unhelpful and misleading’.
Elsewhere, almost a quarter of police forces have policies to tackle ‘menopause’, while more than 40 per cent have none for postmenopausal female staff, according to a Freedom of Information request.
The findings are further evidence of the widespread practice among government agencies, as an audit by the Mail last year found, finding examples within the fire service, police, councils and NHS.
Critics said it was wrong to compare the two, with one affecting all women and the other affecting about two percent of men.
Almost a quarter of police forces have a policy to tackle ‘manopause’, but more than 40 percent had nothing for female staff going through menopause (file photo)
A quarter of NHS trusts have no menopause policy for women, research shows (file photo)
Male menopause, also called ‘andropause’, is characterized by a gradual change in testosterone levels.
As with women, the term is used to describe the period in an adult man’s life when his hormone levels drop, potentially causing symptoms such as erectile dysfunction, depression, anxiety and rapid fat gain.
But there is much debate within the medical community about whether it should be recognized as a condition at all.
Dr. Channa Jayasena, a hormone specialist at Imperial College London, and author of the Society for Endocrinology guidelines on testosterone replacement therapy, said this should not be called ‘manopause’.
“I think it’s a useless term,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Menopause Matters series.
‘If we compare it to menopause, all women go through menopause, while 2 percent of men go through ‘manopause’.
‘Menopause is a relatively sudden event in a woman’s life. It lasts two to five years, while declining testosterone levels can develop over decades.”
He said that while all women might benefit from HRT if they had symptoms, this was not the case with testosterone deficiency and many men did not require medical intervention.
Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist and honorary research fellow at Cardiff University, said symptoms associated with manopause, such as brain fog and low mood, are more likely to be the result of common mental disorders such as anxiety or depression.
He said: ‘We’re very interested in medicalising things in the modern world as we recognize more and more conditions, disorders or just atypical ways of being that could be better addressed.
‘Women go through menopause, so to speak, men at a similar stage of life have a similar kind of hormone deficiency problem. It’s a very logical leap to say, ‘well, that’s the male version’ of this established phenomenon.
“But I do think you can go too far and put a label on a problem that may not necessarily be there.”