From brain fog to blood pressure – how real life menopause experiences shaped our recent event
2 February 2026
Adele is a long-serving ARC West public contributor, and one of the brains behind our recent ‘Let’s talk about menopause’ event and video. Here she explains why she wanted to make her idea become a reality.
The seed for this idea came after I was involved in an NIHR forum to inform a commissioned call around the menopause.
That project, coupled with a lot of media attention on the subject, sent me on a shocking voyage of discovery. Some 20 years after the event, I realised I was one of the people who’d walked away from their career when they didn’t need to.
I didn’t understand that things that were happening to me were menopause related and were in fact temporary. I felt I couldn’t operate satisfactorily at the pace that was needed for my job and its responsibilities.
A key change was slower retrieval of language and vocabulary. Part of my job was to teach French. I found my performance unacceptable, so I resigned when diagnosed with ‘pre stroke symptoms.’
In those days we didn’t talk much about the menopause. I certainly didn’t know about perimenopause or brain fog!
When everything returned to normal after some years, I put it down to a change in medication. But I feel such a fool for not realising that it coincided with coming out the other side of the menopause.
As a public contributor at ARC West on the public health and prevention theme, I was invited to suggest topics for research. I suggested the menopause and we started to plan a project to be shaped by women themselves. We formed an advisory group of women with lived experience, committed to co-production.
Our meetings offered lively debate and inspiring insights, as well as clear articulation of needs and desirable impacts. As a result, we decided to focus on what women wish they’d known about the menopause.
Every time we came away from one of our online meetings, we were blown away by the insights and the range that the group offered us. They stuck with us through the thick and thin of shaping proposals and applications for funding.
It’s taken us a couple of years to get to where we are today. We organised a free community event in Bristol in October 2025. The whole idea was to get people talking. Being able to discuss things openly wasn’t the experience of many post-menopausal women.
The event helped to shape a video that we are making freely available in as many settings as possible.
What’s next? The response to the event and a trial screening of the video has been really encouraging. We are keen to develop a similar event and resource for men.
We hope this work will lead to more discussion and information – not just for women going through menopause, but their friends, family, colleagues and partners. Knowledge is power!