Why we created our Menopause Questionnaire and how it works

Why we created our Menopause Questionnaire

We created our Menopause Questionnaire for two reasons:

Am I menopausal?

One of the most common questions we hear from women is ‘am I menopausal?’. We wanted to give women a tool that would help them answer this question and also highlight symptoms they may not have thought were related to the menopause transition.

We want to play our part in closing the data gap

Our mission at My Menopause Centre is to empower all women to thrive in their menopausal journey, using evidence-based facts wherever possible to help you harness this exciting time, regardless of your culture, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, health, or economic status. However, we are acutely aware that much of the data available to us draws on research on white Western heterosexual women, meaning that anyone who doesn’t fit these criteria can feel overlooked and disadvantaged in understanding their symptoms and treatment options.

So the other reason for creating our Menopause Questionnaire is to play our part in closing this data gap. Everyone who completes the questionnaire will contribute to our collective understanding of how the menopause is experienced. The more women of different ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds that complete our questionnaire, the better our collective understanding will be. We aim to build on and enhance existing information on how the menopause impacts women, using it to work with others to campaign and help improve the support provided to women as they transition through the menopause.

How does our Menopause Questionnaire work?

When our doctors meet with a patient, they listen carefully to how she describes her symptoms, any changes to bleeding, and the rest of her gynaecological history. That, combined with her age, will help them assess whether or not she is in the menopause transition and, if so, which stage.

Our Menopause Questionnaire was designed to capture the key questions used by our doctors to form a diagnosis, and from this we created a flow chart of the different responses:

• We used the Greene Climacteric scale to record symptoms, a scale that is used widely internationally and reproduced with permission. There was concern that there is no threshold score to say whether you are or aren’t in the menopause transition – and 1 in 5 women do not experience any symptoms at all. That’s why we have taken other factors into account, including age and bleeding.
• We did a huge amount of work to map out all the different possible answers to the questions. With menopause symptoms it is tricky to try and automate this process as many symptoms of the menopause can have other causes – there is no one specific symptom to the menopause. This is a limitation of the questionnaire and is why it could and should never replace a consultation with a doctor.

To give you a personalised assessment within a few minutes of completing the questionnaire we needed to automate the analysis of the results, and we created an algorithm to do this for us. So, you fill in the questionnaire, the answers pass through the flow chart ‘behind the scenes’, and the algorithm enables us to send you your personalised assessment.

Our Menopause Questionnaire, as wonderful and useful as it is, can and should never replace a consultation with a doctor. There are likely to be clinical scenarios that we may have missed. There are as many different scenarios as there are women in the menopause. So, we hope that you will use it in the spirit it was intended – to empower you with evidence-based information and advice, to encourage you to speak to a doctor about how you are feeling and to start the journey to taking control of your menopause symptoms and feeling better.

If you haven’t already, why not take our Menopause Questionnaire now.