ITV's Doctor Amir Khan says women surprised by three symptoms including itchiness

ITV's Doctor Amir Khan
-Credit: (Image: ITV)


Dr Amir Khan, who often appears on ITV's Lorraine, has shared that although you may think you have a UTI, or recurring UTI's, due to your toilet symptoms, it may be nothing to do with that at all. Speaking on the show today (October 16), the health expert said that when you go to your doctor, you need to stop asking for antibiotics and instead, ask for cream.

The doctor revealed that in the UK, 30 million people suffer from symptoms of the menopause or are are menopausal or are peri-menopausal at any given time. With it being World Menopause day, Dr Khan said that many women feel they are "completely blindsided by their symptoms and 41% say they actually feel lonely and discarded at the time of the menopause. So there’s a lot of work to be done when it comes to dealing with the menopause."

The menopause is defined as going 12 consecutive months without a period and is caused by a natural decline in your sex hormones produced by the ovaries, called oestrogen. "You can get it through medical treatment or surgical treatment that affect your ovaries - that’s called a medical or surgical menopause", he explains.

"Now the peri-menopause is the time leading up to menopause. It can start as early as your 30s and as late as your 50s and it's the decline in oestrogen", he adds. The way symptoms occur though is not linear and is described as a "roller coaster of hormones which affect other hormones".

"Some of the hormones impacted can control your mood so you get "fluctuations of things like irregular period, mood swings, hot hot flushes. But they come and go and you think 'am I in menopause? Am I not?' and it’s because of these fluctuations."

Talking about the lesser known symptoms, he says that there are 50, if not more, different symptoms you can go through and "some of the ones that women come and talk to me about that we don’t talk enough about is something called Genital Urinary Syndrome.

"So one of the jobs of oestrogen is to keep the skin of the vagina and vulva nice and plump, soft and moist and when oestrogen levels go down, the vagina becomes very dry and we call it atrophy and that I can give you an itchy vagina, pain during intercourse. But one of the common symptoms is urinary symptoms so you’re going to the toilet more."

With symptoms like stinging when you pee and needing to go to the toilet more often overlapping with a Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) people, and some GPs, mistakenly think that they have this and are prescribed antibiotics to clear the infection. "They’re [GPs] not treating the underlying cause. So if you’re getting recurrent UTIs go and see your doctor and ask for Oestrogen cream. That’s what you need to put down there, plump of the vagina vulva more, less UTIs, less sore vaginas - that’s what we want."