Baby Blues and Menopausal Depression: A Connection?

We’ve talked about depression during menopause. It’s a common, joy-sapping beastie that rears its ugly head during this time of whacked-out hormones and middle-age adjustment.

After all, what with hot flashes, insomnia, loss of libido, mood swings, who wouldn’t feel depressed?

While we may not exactly sail through menopause, most of us make it through “the change” relatively unscathed. But for a few, the hormonal fluctuations that may precede menopause by a number of years is part of a larger picture—sort of a déjà vu experience that we ought to be aware of so as not to be blindsided by it.

Episodes of depression are common, and they are more common for women than for men. About 20 percent of women—one in five—will experience major depression at some point in life, and that’s twice the rate at which men become depressed, according to this report in “Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience.”

Why this happens is unclear, but one obvious culprit is the normal hormonal fluctuations that occur at predictable points in a woman’s life: puberty, menstrual cycles, childbirth, and menopause. Some women appear to be more sensitive to these hormonal changes, and depression—sometimes crippling in its intensity—can result. These predictable points at which female hormones are on a roller coaster may be considered “windows of vulnerability.”

Perimenopause—the years immediately preceding active menopause—seems to be the point at which depressive episodes are more frequent. Even before a woman’s menstrual cycle is changing, her hormones may be dancing the rhumba. Perimenopause can last for five years, on average, and 95 percent of women enter it between the ages of 39 and 51.

“These periods are not only marked by extreme hormone variations but may also be accompanied by the occurrence of significant life stressors and changes in personal, family, and professional responsibilities,” writes researcher Claudio Soares in this report for Biomedcentral.com.

The thing to be aware of, however, is that the biggest predictor of perimenopausal or menopausal depression is a prior episode of depression. And the “reproductive life cycle event” most strongly correlated with perimenopausal depression is postpartum depression—the “baby blues.”

“We also found, however, a correlation between perimenopausal mood ratings and ratings at other reproductive cycle events, especially between perimenopausal depression and postpartum depression,” write the authors of this study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. “This suggests that there may be a subgroup of women who have a specific vulnerability to developing reproductive cycle event–related depression.”

Other well-regarded studies have confirmed these correlations.

What this means for you, as you head into your final and very challenging “reproductive life cycle event,” is that if you’ve experienced postpartum depression or hard-core premenstrual syndrome, you may be at higher risk for depression during perimenopause or menopause.

In fact, if you’ve had one prior incident of depression, your chances of having another are one in two (fifty percent). If you’ve had three previous depressive episodes, your likelihood of experiencing another is 95 percent, according to The Massachusetts Health Study cited in this report.

But that doesn't mean you're without resources: Forewarned, as they say is forearmed. In our next blog post, we'll talk about what you can do to increase awareness and keep yourself healthy—in body, heart, and mind.