In this section we ask about a number of menopause symptoms to pre-screen women for peri-menopause and menopause.
Most of the symptoms listed are from Greene Climacteric Scale (GCS) and include psychological, physical and vasomotor symptom questions. This is a brief standard measure of core climacteric (menopausal) symptoms and widely used by practitioners.
The GCS helps us understand your symptoms by giving you a score. It can be useful to use the score to assess the changes in different symptoms, before and after your peri-menopause or menopause treatment to help and easily monitor improvements. The score alone isn’t used to diagnose whether you are in the menopause transition.
Diagnostic tests will be required to do this.
The symptoms don't all happen at the same time during the menopause transition, so the scale just gives a snapshot of how things are for you at the moment. This is another reason why it can be useful to repeat the questionnaire after 6 or 12 months (or sooner if you feel that your symptoms are changing more quickly).
You will also see that not all of the symptoms listed are specific to menopause, which means that you can have some of the symptoms without being in the perimenopause or menopause. However, if these symptoms have only occurred recently or have recently got worse, it could be a good indicator that you’re heading towards menopause.