The Male Menopause Myth

Nowadays most people know that menopause is not only a women's characteristic, but rather e phase that men also go through. They too experience hot flashes and night sweats, they too have troubles getting a good night sleep during this period, often lose their temper and change their mood continuously. This generally happens with men somewhere between their 40s and 50s. The cause for such unpleasant changes has been established to be the gradual reduction of testosterone levels.

Thus, most men experience loss of sexual appetite or functioning, tiredness, moments of memory loss and depression. As we have mentioned before, these symptoms usually manifest themselves in men somewhere between 40 and 50 years old; we said usually, but today we can track such manifestations in younger men, in their 20s. Thus, what was normally thought to be a hormonal change problem, we have discovered to be in fact a breathing problem.

Such a discovery can be sustained by physical observation of some subjects. Thus, I've noticed that most young men experiencing such problems have a narrow upper airway, of about 2-3 mm wide (this can be easily seen with a flexible camera). The cause for such a condition is the smaller jaw structure and dental crowding. Thus, every time a man with such a body structure falls asleep the relaxed muscles of the mouth and tongue leads to the partial obstruction of the airway. Whenever this happens, the man awakes and changes his sleeping position. Most of the men solve this unpleasant problem by avoiding sleeping with their face up, but rather on their stomach or sides.

Thus, the frequent collapse of the tongue (regardless of the cause - cold, allergies of any kind, other inflammation), the person's sleep is deeply troubled as a consequence of the frequent arousals. Lack of enough sleep leads to an unbalance in the nervous system which develop in their turn all the so called vasomotor manifestation, that is: temperature fluctuations, heart palpitations and sweating. Such a man, having this different anatomy, usually gains weight easily and present all the so called male menopause symptoms.

The partial airways obstruction has a variable duration; however, if the obstruction lasts more than 10 seconds it is called apneas. Having 10 or 15 apneas an hour can lead to the obstructive sleep apnea diagnosis. This is a serious diagnosis, since it can further develop depression, obesity, sexual problems, memory loss, hypertension, nervousness, glucose intolerance, heart disease, frequent night urinations, heart attack and stroke. Testosterone levels and thyroid hormone levels can go down due to psychological stress and thus leading to hypothyroidism or low testosterone presumptions.

As you can see, the so called male menopause is a real phenomenon generated by different factors as you may assume. When speaking about men, there is no actual menopause (menses cessation in literal translation), but rather a sleep-breathing problem.

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