cover image 150 Most-Asked Questions about Menopause: What Women Really Want to Know

150 Most-Asked Questions about Menopause: What Women Really Want to Know

Ruth S. Jacobowitz. Hearst Communications, $15 (238pp) ISBN 978-0-688-11561-6

The next stage in the lives of female baby boomers is menopause, and Jacobowitz (author, with Wulf Utian, M.D., of Managing Your Menopause ) urges her readers to learn more about this, while providing standard facts and counsel. By the turn of the century, she notes, the number of women in the menopausal age range (45 to 55) will swell to 50 million. The good news: she believes that this will be the first generation of women to approach menopause with the information they need, not just pass-along advice from well-meaning friends and relatives. Using a question-and-answer format (the questions, she says, were those most often asked by women with whom she spoke during lecture tours), Jacobowitz rightly stresses that menopause affects each woman differently, and notes that symptoms are more than hot flashes and mood swings. She offers tips on lifestyle changes and make-overs, improving diet, nontraditional remedies for menopausal symptoms, and starting an exercise program. The controversy regarding estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) for menopausal symptoms continues, and Jacobowitz notes that the fear that it contributes to breast cancer is the primary reason why women choose not to use it. Her somewhat strange response to those women concerned about what some researchers call a small risk of breast cancer: although breast cancer accounts for 27% of all cancers in women, it yielded its number-one position to lung cancer in 1989. Moreover, she notes, eight times as many women will die from coronary heart disease as from breast cancer. Does such reasoning make ERT a good choice? Author tour; Literary Guild alternate. (Jan.)