UK MS Register blog. Published 30th October 2024
The UK MS Register will soon be hosting a new questionnaire on MS and menopause. The questionnaire has been developed by Imogen, a PhD student at the Centre for Preventive Neurology at Queen Mary University of London. She is working with the UK MS Register on a study about the impact and experience of menopause for people with MS.
What do we know about MS and menopause?
We know that most women with MS will go through menopause at some point after their MS diagnosis. We also know that menopause causes changes to your hormone levels.
Hormones are chemicals that carry messages around your body. Changes in hormone levels during pregnancy tend to mean that people with MS experience fewer relapses.
However, there has been very little research into the potential impact of menopause for people with MS.
What are we trying to find out?
In our study, we are trying to answer three main questions:
- Does MS get worse faster after menopause?
- Does the severity of someone’s menopause symptoms impact the severity of their MS symptoms during menopause?
- Does the severity of someone’s menopause symptoms impact how fast their MS gets worse after menopause?
We also want to find out about:
- What people with MS choose to do to manage their menopause symptoms, and which strategies they find most helpful.
- Where people with MS look for information and advice about menopause.
- The experiences that people with MS have with health professionals around menopause.
What is special about this study?
Working with the UK MS Register means that this study is likely to be the biggest of its kind so far. It also means that we can look at information from people with MS, rather than looking at scans or medical test results. This is a new approach to researching menopause and MS which will give us important insights into the perspectives of people with MS.
Your Participation
This is where we need your help.
We are inviting all female participants of the UK MS Register to complete our questionnaire. It should take around 10 – 15 minutes and will be available from November 2024.
There are no age limits, and we would like everyone to take part whether you have been through menopause or not. We will divide the answers from the questionnaire into three groups:
- Group 1: people who are currently going through menopause/perimenopause.
- Group 2: people who have been through menopause.
- Group 3: people who have not yet entered menopause (i.e. everyone who still has periods and has not noticed any changes or symptoms that they think might be due to menopause).
We will compare answers between these groups to see whether the speed at which MS gets worse is different before, during and after menopause.
We will also ask everyone in groups 1 and 2 about their menopause symptoms. We will compare answers from people who had severe menopause symptoms to answers from people who had minimal menopause symptoms, to see if this has any impact on their MS.
How will this study help people with MS?
The more we learn about the impact and experience of menopause for people with MS, the better informed people with MS and health professionals can be about what to expect during this time. We want to use findings from this study to improve support for people with MS during and beyond menopause.