CNN – Thirty-eight-year-old Rosy Devi’s body aches most of the time, short walks have become difficult, she loses her breath easily, has chest pain and feels her health is generally getting worse.
It has been a gradual decline, she says, since her hysterectomy in 2019 which led to her prematurely going through menopause.
“I am walking and suddenly feel intense heat in my body and start sweating. And I get chest pain, like someone has hit me in the back,” says the mother of four who lives in India’s eastern state of Bihar.
She never imagined the menopause, the time of life a woman stops getting her period permanently, would take such a toll on her body. “Now I am really feeling old. I mean, I feel that I have really become old… The body, the face, everything has changed,” she says.
For Devi, menopause was also something she expected to experience much later in life, not because of surgery, so the whole thing came as quite a surprise, she admits.
But it’s a change that affects half the world’s population at some stage, and Devi’s symptoms are some of the wider-ranging and lesser-known effects that come with it.
Symptoms such as hot flashes and mood changes are well known, and often stereotyped, but experts worldwide want to highlight that women face a huge range of changes to their bodies during the menopause – and lack of awareness means many will start experiencing symptoms without knowing why.
Here’s what everyone needs to know.
What is menopause – and why don’t people know enough about it?
Menopause is when women experience an end to their periods, or menstruation, for more than 12 months, and it marks the end of their reproductive years.
Globally, most women experience menopause between the ages of 45 and 55 …
