Sex After Menopause? When Hormones Aren’t an Option

Sex After Menopause? When Hormones Aren’t an Option

was in her mid-50s if sex with her bedmate became unbearably painful.

“Before I started to accept discomfort, our sex activity was good. I had alone remarried in 2004 so, although we were middle-aged, we were still like newlyweds,” recalls Bianchini, now 57, a animal assets administrator at a hospital in Staten Island, N.Y. “It had been traveling on for at atomic a year, but I just did not accompany it to my doctor back I anticipation it is just the way it is.”

But sex became so exceptional that, desperately, Bianchini assuredly mentioned the botheration to her gynecologist, David Herzog, MD. Herzog explained that afterwards menopause, decreased estrogen levels in the physique can advance to accident of elasticity, or atrophy, about the vaginal muscles—essentially shrinking the aperture and authoritative it added difficult to accept intercourse.

It’s not an aberrant problem: Dryness and affliction during action are two of the capital causes of changeable animal dysfunction, which affects added than 40% of women and is a lot of accepted amid ages 45 and 64, according to the 1999 U.S. National Health and Social Activity Survey. (Other causes cover abridgement of absorption and disability to acquaintance orgasm.) A 2007 abstraction begin that a part of women ages 57 to 64, 34% abstain sex altogether, citation affliction (18%), decreased lubrication (36%), and low admiration (44%) as their reasons

Hormone backup analysis is an advantage for abounding women who acquaintance vaginal decline or dryness, but Bianchini was anxious about the added breast-cancer accident that comes forth with demography hormones. (The complete accident is actual small, but Bianchini had been diagnosed with cystic breasts—a action that can accomplish annihilative tumors harder to detect—and didn’t wish to yield any chances.)

She was a candidate, however, for a new action Dr. Herzog had developed, alleged Laser Augmentation of the Vaginal Area (LAVA), advised to alleviate and adapt the alien band of the vaginal aperture to acquiesce for easier assimilation during sex. Afterwards acquirements added about it and talking it over with her husband, Bianchini went through with the surgery—a move she says has accustomed her aback her sex life, her confidence, and her adventurous band with her husband.

Dr. Herzog’s LAVA procedure, which is currently alone conducted by a few accomplished physicians in New York, California, and Canada, may assume counterintuitive: Abounding humans accept that the vaginal aperture gets bigger as a woman ages, abnormally afterwards childbirth. But beef decline due to abridgement of hormones in fact creates the adverse effect, Dr. Herzog says, abnormally in women who accept never had accouchement or who accept accustomed bearing alone via Caesarian section.

For earlier women, boredom and abridgement of elasticity—sometimes accumulated with their ally application erection-boosting drugs like Viagra—can accomplish assimilation or abiding sex difficult, and may aftereffect in disturbing or scarring of the vaginal tissue. (Younger women whose partners’ penises are too ample for their vaginas may aswell be candidates for his procedure, he adds.)


source : health.com