Is it Menopause or Hyperparathyroidism?

Hyperparathyroidism, which leads to osteoporosis and diseases of the kidney, heart, & brain, mimics the symptoms of menopause. It also may be massively under-diagnosed in women over 50.

Last June, after my car crash, I tapped out a sentence with a broken hand that I hope I won’t keep typing, again and again, for the rest of my life: “Suffice it to say,” I wrote, “it would be nice if my body could stop being a frequent object lesson in the ravages of sexism and capitalism on the female body. But here we are. Once again.”

I’m sorry to report that here we are once again, again. And I’m bringing this to your attention once again, again, because there may be a far greater than a five percent¹ chance, if you’re a woman older than 50, that your osteoporotic bones, like mine, have been hollowed out, however silently, by a disease called hyperparathyroidism, whose symptoms mimic those of menopause. Up until quite recently, doctors have called this disease rare because—surprise surprise—it mostly effects women over fifty, who are nevertheless three times more likely to get it as men; we rarely test for it when we should, meaning soon after a woman enters menopause and not a decade and a half later; and our data, because of this, is once again woefully incomplete. I’d never even heard of hyperparathyroidism or its ravages to the bones until I was diagnosed with it a few weeks ago. Now I’m trying to figure out when and how to book surgery—called a parathyroidectomy—to fix it.

The good news is that it’s completely curable via this surgery. The bad news is that, judging by the severity of my bone loss, I’ve probably had this disease festering inside me for years if not more than a decade.

First, the facts. Last June—ironically just hours before an exploding airbag would shatter the bones in my wrist and hand²—I went for a DEXA scan to check the density of my bones. The CDC does not recommend women get bone density scans until we turn 65, but I’d had a conversation with Joanna Strober, CEO of MidiHealth, about the importance of getting one sooner, especially for smaller-boned women like me, so at my annual physical last May, I asked my doctor if I could get one, and he said sure. My gynecologist agreed, and she ordered the scan³.

The diagnosis of full-blown osteoporosis a few days later was not only shocking, my numbers were so bad, I essentially have the bones of an eighty-year-old. Equally disturbing, it was impossible to get a quick appointment with an endocrinologist or rheumatologist to figure out the whys and hows of this. I also had no idea which specialist was the correct specialist to see, so I just booked appointments with both and had to wait an annoying nine months to see them. (God bless American healthcare.)

Once I had the diagnosis in hand, I started digging. And what I found made me enraged, once again, over our lack of knowledge of the menopausal female body.