Menopause + Hemochromatosis = Hemopause (and women of a certain age are at risk)

Are you dealing with menopause, or the approach of menopause? Then this blog post is for you. Some women approaching menopause are at risk of absorbing too much iron, resulting in serious joint pain and damage to the liver, pancreas, heart, brain, and other soft tissue.

Why? Before menopause, the menstrual cycle gives women a natural defense against excess iron buildup; that monthly loss of blood removes iron from the body. However, this can mask a surprisingly common genetic disease called hemochromatosis in which the body's normal handling of iron is disrupted, leading to a potentially fatal condition called iron overload (it's what killed Hemingway and it's what Tamra Barney's son Ryan has on Real Housewives of Orange County).

This blog post explains the problem and how to defend yourself and the women you love.

What is Hemopause?

Without that natural monthly loss of blood, undiagnosed hemochromatosis can start causing damage that is hard to detect before it becomes irreversible. I know this because it happened to my wife. Her body started loading iron when she was in her early forties. Doctors did not diagnose it until she was 55 and extremely ill. That was in 2008. In 2010, I created this websiteto raise awareness of hemochromatosis.

Since then we have encountered many women who have experienced the same problem. Some of them have posted comments here on the blog, others have shared their stories over on the hemochromatosis page on Facebook. This syndrome is so common that in 2012 I gave it a name: hemopause. What follows is a new version of the first blog post that I wrote about hemopause, along with some advice on how to protect yourself from this disease.

Hemopause is a syndrome which afflicts women entering menopause with undiagnosed hereditary hemochromatosis, often referred to as HH for short. There are 7 main elements of hemopause:

1. Women with HH may not process iron properly which can lead to toxic iron accumulation.


2. Regular blood loss is the best known means of preventing/reversing the toxic iron accumulation caused by HH.


3. The regular blood loss that most women have experienced since puberty can both mask and guard against HH.


4. Menopause slows and then stops the protective blood loss.


5. If you have the genetic defect that causes HH, the onset of menopause may cause iron accumulation to damage your health.


6. Common symptoms of HH include: joint pain; chronic fatigue; liver and heart problems; pancreas damage; thyroid and adrenal issues; diabetes; loss of libido; depression; orange or gray skin.


7. Because you are menopausal your doctor may dismiss these symptoms of permanent iron damage as temporary effects of menopause, so the damage continues.

Your Doctor Will Says It's Menopause

Let’s take the 7th element first because that’s the way hemopause tends to come up in conversation. Quite frankly my wife and I have lost track of the number of conversations we've had with women of a certain age that go like this:

I started having joint pain. I lost interest in sex and was constantly fatigued. I talked to my doctor and he said it was “the change” and a lot of women experience these symptoms during menopause. He said things would improve but they haven’t, in fact things seem to be getting worse. The doctor says a lot of it is in my head…

Note that having a doctor who is a ‘she’ and not a ‘he’ is no guarantee that you will have a different conversation. Doctors of both genders in America tend to be massively under-informed about HH in relation to the prevalence of this genetic condition (there's actually a scientific paper that says this). Few doctors even know how often HH occurs in the population. In fact, it the most common genetic disease in North America. About 1 in 300 have the genetic defect that can give rise to iron overload. Among Caucasians the prevalence is 1 in 200. (In Ireland it is greater than 1 in 100, which is where the term Celtic Curse comes from.)

Common misconceptions that doctors have about HH include the following:

• It rarely affects women: Wrong! It might have seemed like that when fewer women lived beyond menopause, but we have met many young women who live with this condition.


• It is only present if you have skin discoloration: Wrong! Although bronze or gray discoloration is one possible symptom, many patients don't get that symptom.


• It only affects people of Irish descent: Wrong! Although HH is highly prevalent in Ireland, having no known Celtic antecedents does not make you immune. People who self-identify as African American or Hispanic can have HH.


• It's no big deal because you can cure it with phlebotomy: Wrong! There is no cure and some damage may be irreversible.


• It is rare these days: Wrong! It remains America’s most common genetic defect which can cause death if undiagnosed, and it continues to be passed from parents to children.

To be fair, there is some overlap between the effects produced by menopause and the symptoms of the iron overloading caused by hereditary hemochromatosis (which may be referred to as genetic haemochromatosis outside of North America). The problem is that too few doctors are even considering hemochromatosis when treating menopausal women. This needs to change.

The Good News

There is a cheap and simple blood test for iron levels and it should be routine at the first signs of menopause (see the Iron Disorders Institute for more information). Medical history should be factored in when consulting about menopause. (There is also a genetic test that you can take before, during, or after menopause, to see if you are susceptible to this problem.)

We think the medical community and society at large must begin weighing those simple and inexpensive steps against the costly consequences of failure to diagnose iron imbalance until it is too late: unnecessary suffering and premature death from liver cancer, heart disease, stroke, plus disabling joint pain and chronic fatigue, vision loss, diabetes, and depression (not all of these symptoms can be reversed by treatment after diagnosis).

As a final piece of irony in the hemo-pause saga of menopause and iron overload, consider this: hemochromatosis can cause early onset of menopause. Yet another reason that, as soon as any woman starts to experience any signs of menopause, she should have her iron levels checked and, if there is a family history of liver and/or heart disease, she should seriously consider a genetic test for hereditary hemochromatosis.

So, let’s raise awareness of both menopause and hemochromatosis, because the latter is making the former a matter of life and death for too many women.