Exclusive: An Inside Look at Oprah Winfrey's 'The Menopause Revolution' Special

Yahoo

28-03-2025

When Oprah Winfrey was 48 years old, she started getting heart palpitations. 'For two years straight, I did not sleep,' she says at the top of An Oprah Winfrey Special: The Menopause Revolution, a primetime television event airing Monday, March 31 from 10:01-11 p.m. PT on ABC and the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.
'I went to five different doctors in Chicago,' she continues. 'At one point, I thought, 'Maybe it's because they're all men.' So I found a female doctor, a cardiologist, and she gave me an angiogram and put me on heart medication that I knew the next day was not working for me. … I ended up wearing a heart monitor for weeks.'
Winfrey struggled to find answers as her fear skyrocketed. 'Every night for a solid two years, with horrible heart palpitations, I thought I was going to die,' she says. 'One day at the office, I picked up a book, and the page is open to: 'Palpitations: Your Heart's Wakeup Call.' And that was the first time I learned that those were symptoms that the change was coming — and for me, that the change was already there.'
She thus set out to create a dialogue between high-profile figures, everyday women and medical experts. Of the special, Winfrey tells Los Angeles: 'The guests featured are all helping us understand and view menopause from a new lens, bringing updated information and research to women around the world.'
Every woman will face menopause — 'If you live long enough, menopause is coming for you,' Winfrey quips in the show — preceded by perimenopause, the transitional period before her reproductive years end. One billion women around the world are experiencing it, Winfrey notes, adding: 'Despite its impact on half the global population, menopause has remained a taboo topic.'
New research suggests women as young as 35 can start showing symptoms, which a video medley of women on the special enumerate: Anxiety, bloating, constipation, body odor, breast soreness, brain fog, depression, difficulty concentrating, hair loss, hot flashes, heart palpitations, irregular periods, irritability, itchy skin, memory lapses, sleeplessness, libido changes, mood swings, pain during sex, weight gain and vaginal dryness.
'So, instead of suffering in silence or wrapping it in shame about getting older, we can stop the stereotype so we can change this conversation,' Winfrey says. As she coins at the start of the show, filmed before a live audience: 'Welcome to the menopause revolution!'
Like Winfrey, Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry had a frustrating experience with doctors. 'I had razor blades in my vagina after a great night of sex,' says Berry in a pretaped video. 'I went to the doctor and he told me, 'Oh, this looks like the worst case of herpes I've ever seen.''
Both she and her partner, Van Hunt, got tested for the disease, and they were negative. 'This was my 'aha moment,'' says Berry upon joining Winfrey live. 'And I said, 'Okay, doctor, if it's not herpes, then what is it?' He said, 'I don't know.' And that wasn't good enough.'
Her eye doctor couldn't even say the word when she visited him for drying eye glands. ('Everything gets dry: dry eyes, dry mouth,' she notes.) 'And I said, 'Doctor, is it because I'm in menopause?' And he said, 'Yes, yes, but I couldn't say that to Halle Berry.'… I said, 'If you can't even say the word, how can you treat me?''
Berry decided to use her voice to educate others — including her daughter. 'I was alone. I was afraid. I thought I was going crazy,' she says. 'And I thought, 'My God, if I felt like this, I can imagine that millions of other women felt this way,' and I was compelled to do something.'
She joined forces with U.S. Senator Patty Murray — 'to create a standalone bill that all the funds go to menopause research and clinical trials,' she says — and launched her own digital platform, Respin. The community forum provides answers to 're-spin' the public conception of menopause, and also sells products for problems like vaginal dryness.
'You know you're a sex symbol, right?' Winfrey says to Berry. 'Because you are Halle Berry, and the fact that you are willing to say it out loud has really changed it from being a taboo word, a whispered word, to something that's flirty.'
For Berry, the diagnosis — of what appeared when she was 48 but wasn't confirmed until she was 54 — felt like a liberation. 'When I figured out that I was in perimenopause and I knew that I didn't have to stay stuck in this very scary, very alone, rageful place, then I felt the power,' she says. 'I said, 'Wow, I feel like I'm the best me I've ever been.''
Dr. Mary Claire Haver, author of the 2024 bestselling book The New Menopause, explains how most physicians are not trained in menopause. 'It is six to eight average visits before the menopause is actually diagnosed for most patients,' she says upon joining Berry and Winfrey.
Haver explains how females lose their finite egg supply through ovulation over the years (a 40-year-old is left with 3% of the eggs she started with). During a normal menstrual cycle, the brain will detect low estrogen levels and produce LH and FSH — which hormones signal the ovaries to produce estrogen and progesterone. 'What happens in perimenopause is we reach a critical low level of egg supply where signals from the brain no longer work. … Because the ovaries can't respond, the brain keeps sending more and more signals,' she says, calling the period defined by erratically fluctuating hormones 'the zone of chaos.'
'The brain has to work harder and harder, and that's when we see the mental health challenges, the cognition changes,' says Haver, who notes that as neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin change, 40% of women experience mental health changes including brain fog and ADHD. 'The average age of menopause is 51 … for women of color, it is about 18 months sooner,' she says, recommending women be their own health advocates and look to resources like The Menopause Society on menopause.org.
Haver penned the forward in the new bestselling book published in January 2025 by Golden Globe-, Emmy- and Oscar-nominated actress Naomi Watts: Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause.
'You posted this,' Winfrey says when Watts joins the group. ''Over the course of my career as an actor, I've outrun tsunamis. I've come face-to-face with 'King Kong,' but nothing prepared me for early menopause.''
'At 36, when I was trying to start a family and not getting pregnant, I asked my doctor what was going on,' Watts recalls. 'He took some blood work, and the results came back and suggested that I was 'close to menopause.' And I was shocked. … I was filled with panic and loneliness and shame.' Watts called her mom, who said she'd never discussed it with her daughter as it was a conversation her mother had never had with her. To Watts, menopause had been branded as the end of womanhood: 'That once your reproductive organs are no longer in use or working in the way that they started to, that that's it: Go to the corner, pull out the knitting needles and rock in the chair. Like, 'No, thank you.''
In her book, she describes a particularly embarrassing incident when she was about to be intimate with her now-husband, actor Billy Crudup — which Winfrey has her recall. 'We were getting down to business, and I had to excuse myself. I remembered that I had my estrogen patch on, and if anyone has worn one, they leave a very sticky, nasty mess,' Watts says, noting she didn't want the patch on her groin to announce that she was in menopause. '[I was] thinking, 'This is going to be so unsexy, and turn him off in a second.''
She continues, 'So I slipped away, came out sort of frantic after having scratched and scratched and left a horrible red, nasty mark. He saw that I was flustered, and he said, 'Are you okay? You're not in the mood?' 'And I said, 'No, no, it's just, well … menopause! I'm in menopause. I'm getting treatment. I have to wear these patches. … I'm in menopause, and I'm old, and should I just leave? Because you probably don't want me.'' Watts recalls Crudup's answer: 'He was like, 'Hey, this is good news that you're getting treatment. Thank you for telling me. And by the way, we're both old …'' Winfrey chimes in with the line that Watts is too bashful to recount. 'He said, 'I have gray hairs on my balls,'' Winfrey says. 'And you said—'
''That is the most romantic thing I've ever heard!'' Watts finishes. ''And thank you for your compassion and empathy.' That was the beginning, and seven years later, we're married.'
In fall of 2022, Watts created Stripes Beauty — which offers women education and community as well as body and vaginal products. 'We've earned our stripes, ladies,' Watts says. 'We should feel good about ourselves at this point in time.'
To pool resources and address all different conditions associated with menopause, the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio launched the Women's Comprehensive Health and Research Center. With over 140 specialties, the clinic can help women improve everything including their sex lives, through treatments like vaginal hormones in the form of a ring, daily medications and injectables.
The center's chief visionary and strategic advisor is Maria Shriver — who, upon joining the group, tells Winfrey that she wants women to view menopause as a blessing. 'Because it means you've lived long enough to actually go through it.'
Shriver tells Los Angeles that she believes women have been done a great disservice. 'We can change that by demanding more research, more women's health centers and better education for doctors in medical school,' says Shriver, who notes most people are surprised to learn that it's not just a gynecological phenomenon but a complex process taking place in the brain.
'Those hot flashes and night sweats are reactions caused by your brain responding to a loss of estrogen,' Shriver explains to Los Angeles. 'We now believe that for some women, that loss of estrogen to the brain may put them at increased risk for a number of neurological diseases with age, including Alzheimer's.'
Shriver set about studying changes to the brain during aging as she watched her parents' health decline. 'My parents were energetic powerhouses, working passionately all their lives and advocating for the many causes they supported way beyond what most people consider 'retirement age,'' she says. 'But my mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, did eventually experience a series of strokes, and my father, Sargent Shriver, developed Alzheimer's disease.'
When her father was diagnosed in 2004, Alzheimer's wasn't a disease people spoke about — so Shriver put on her 'journalist's hat' to learn more. 'In 2010, I partnered with the Alzheimer's Association to put out The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Takes on Alzheimer's, which was a pivotal moment for me in determining my journey in the Alzheimer's space, and also for the nation,' she says, 'because it was the first public reporting of the fact that women are twice as likely as men to develop the disease.'
Shiver started the Women's Alzheimer's Movement (WAM), which joined the Cleveland Clinic three years ago — where she funds research to address the disproportionate impact of Alzheimer's on women. 'That work has led to our ever-greater understanding that the brain is a critical part of the aging process,' she tells Los Angeles. She learned that while most women's brains recover from the sudden loss of estrogen during menopause, others experience a lasting impact. 'My recommendation is to find a doctor who is an expert in treating perimenopause and menopause and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of hormone treatment. It's right for some women, and not for others.'
As the special relates, in the past, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has been controversial. In the early 1990s, the National Institutes of Health began the Women's Health Initiative, a landmark study of more than 160,000 postmenopausal women ages 50 to 79. In 2002, a hormone therapy clinical trial came to an abrupt halt when researchers claimed it could increase a woman's chances of getting breast cancer, as well as cardiac events, strokes and clots.
'A lot of the problems with people being scared of taking estrogens [came from] the older HRT studies about breast cancer,' Dr. Rhonda Voskuhl, a professor of neurology at UCLA and the faculty neurologist for the UCLA Comprehensive Menopause Care Program, explains to Los Angeles. Voskuhl's studies of women with multiple sclerosis (MS) — who performed much better when pregnant and had higher estrogen — led to her work on how the decline in estrogen that all women experience as they age leads to more serious cognitive problems.
'It became clear to me that there's something very neuroprotective, very good for the brain, about estrogen,' says Voskuhl. 'I saw in MS women that we could get an improvement in cognition — not just a slowing of the decline. We can see prevention of brain atrophy, and we could also see reduction in a neurodegenerative marker in the blood — all basically within one year of treatment with this novel estrogen. I said, 'Wow, can we take this to menopause?''
She was able to isolate a type of estrogen, pregnancy estrogen, that didn't have the same risks of breast cancer. '[It] binds to the receptor that causes protection in the brain, which is estrogen receptor beta, and [doesn't] bind strongly to estrogen receptor alpha, that's in the breast,' says Voskuhl, who's focused on menopause research over the last three or four years.
She notes that 70% of healthy women have cognitive issues, like brain fog and losing their train of thought, during menopause — particularly women who've been experiencing it for longer periods of time, like 10 years. 'There are structural and functional changes in the brain that occur with menopause,' Voskuhl says when she joins the special. She's proven she can not just slow cognitive decline and brain atrophy in menopausal women, but actually make them better.
Aging and the loss of estrogen also promotes Alzheimer's. 'Alzheimer's disease is two-thirds women,' Voskuhl tells Los Angeles. 'Hot flashes go away after three to five years. But these cognitive problems, they actually get worse … you've got to catch these things early.' She recommends a multipronged approach, through cognitive exercise, physical exercise, a healthy diet and replacing hormones in a safe way. 'I have a unique estrogen, and it's designed to be safer. It's been used in Europe for 40 years. It's been licensed by CleopatraRX. … We've used it for almost two years now, through [UCLA's] Comprehensive Menopause Care program.'
Vaskuhl urges women to seek treatment upon the first cognitive symptoms — but she ultimately believes estrogen would be beneficial to all women as they age. 'If you could actually treat these women with something that's been shown to be safe for decades, and we know it works in the brain to be neuroprotective, could you not only make their symptoms when they're 51 or 55 better [but] show that, 10 years later, the incidence and severity of mild cognitive impairment is decreased, and therefore Alzheimer's disease?' she poses. 'You have to make a real effort to focus on the brain during menopause to prevent these things from happening.' Voskuhl is working on finding an estrogen that's safe enough to take long-term preventatively — as, while promising, the Cleopatra product has only been given to a few thousand women here for a year or two in trial. She says, 'We need to get there, but we have to do it safely.'
Over the course of Winfrey's hour-long special, everyday women also share their stories — from Kamili, who started blogging about her experience as a woman of color going through menopause, to Lynn, who struggled with depression and suicide.
Interspersed in the episode are facts (according to a Mayo Clinic study, menopause cost American women almost $2 billion in lost working time a year, and 73% of women blame menopause for their divorce) as well as comical tidbits from Leanne Morgan's I'm Every Woman Netflix special. ('It comes in the middle of the night like a ghost, and it's called perimenopause,' she quips.)
In her closing words, Watts tells the younger generation they don't have to fear menopause — 'We are the last generation that has had to suffer in silence,' she says — and Berry thinks all women who reach menopause should be thrown a SHE-esta. Their united stance was inspiring.
'All those women, to see them trying to come together to find solutions, it was very helpful,' Voskuhl tells Los Angeles. 'You feel like help is on the way. You really do.'
'Every woman on that sofa was there to help debunk existing myths about menopause and enlighten the audience with medical truths,' Shriver says. 'I'm glad to say that it's a new day for women talking about menopause.'
'Menopause is not something you can outrun, outfox, out-yoga or out-meditate,' Winfrey tells Los Angeles. 'Too often, women deny and lie about their age — which is denying your time spent here on earth and everything that you learned and everything that you gained. This show discusses what you need to know to best advocate for yourself so we can ultimately see how freeing menopause can be in your life, with the best yet to come.'