Lorraine Kelly will be interviewed on her own TV show about her experiences with the menopause as part of a drive to encourage more women to talk about the “taboo” subject.
The TV presenter, 57, will launch the M Word campaign on Monday after research conducted for her ITV show Lorraine found 54% of women have not spoken to their parent about the menopause.
The programme’s resident medical expert Dr Hilary Jones is urging women to find out when their mothers started going through the menopause in order to give them more information about what to expect – and when they might go through it themselves.
Lorraine Kelly (Ian West/PA)
Kelly will be interviewed by Dr Jones as she speaks for the first time on TV in detail about her own experience of the menopause, which happened last year.
Dr Jones said: “There is definitely a genetic link between the age a mum and daughter experience the menopause.
“Yet parents will more readily discuss sex and periods with their daughters than the menopause.
“This is likely because periods are more urgent and happen suddenly whereas the menopause can take several years and can drift by.”
He added: “The menopause will affect all women at some point yet it’s still unfortunately a great taboo. We need to share our experiences to help one another.
“We hope this campaign will break that taboo and encourage more women to talk about the menopause openly.”
Dr Hilary Jones (Ian West/PA)
The research discovered that, out of the 2,000 women surveyed, 61.9% did not know how old their mother was when she started going through the menopause.
Embarrassment and fear over sounding old were among the top reasons those in the study cited for not speaking out about the transition.
Forty-five per cent of women said they were not able to discuss the menopause with friends.
The M Word campaign launches on Lorraine at 8.30am on ITV.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel