As you know, for World Menopause Day/Month this year we are taking as our theme the important problem of postmenopausal vaginal atrophy. It is hoped that the publicity for this problem around World Menopause Day and the accompanying documents will help to highlight this major cause of distress and reduced quality of life and will encourage women all over the world and their medical advisers to seek and provide help.

We are pleased to announce that we will be hosting an international press briefing on Thursday, 7th October in London, UK, with a view to securing media coverage around World Menopause Day. This event, entitled ‘Ending the silent suffering: managing vaginal atrophy in postmenopausal women’, is designed to raise awareness of the importance of good postmenopausal vaginal health and the need for appropriate management of vaginal atrophy. At the briefing, we will introduce our new Recommendations for the management of postmenopausal vaginal atrophy and discuss postmenopausal women’s understanding of and attitudes towards vaginal atrophy and the menopause. The Recommendations will be published online in Climacteric before October 1 and will be available on our website. The paper will be published in print in the December issue of Climacteric.

The ‘Recommendations for the management of postmenopausal vaginal atrophy’ have been prepared by the IMS Writing Group. So that the Recommendations can be read and used by doctors world-wide, a group of IMS members has taken the responsibility of translating the document into seven languages: Spanish (Paulina Villaseca), French (Anne Gompel), Italian (Rossella Nappi), Arabic (Randa Mostafa), Hindi (Sunila Khandelwal), Chinese (Ko-En Huang) and German (Martin Birkhaeuser). We are very grateful to these members for all their hard work, being carried out under considerable time pressure. All the translations will be placed on our website, together with the original English version, for open access as soon as possible. 

New research, to be presented at the press briefing, is expected to show that vaginal atrophy has a significant impact on women’s quality of life, yet awareness and understanding of the condition are low. To overcome these challenges, the IMS will call on doctors and women to proactively talk to each other about vaginal health. Presentations will be given by Dr David Sturdee, IMS President, Dr Tobie de Villiers, IMS Treasurer and President Elect, and Professor Rossella Nappi, IMS Board member, about vaginal health and atrophy as well as the Recommendations. A webcast will be made of the presentations and this will be posted on our website on October 11. We hope that many of you will log in to see the webcast, recommend it to your colleagues, and perhaps invite your local journalists to log on to the webcast themselves. You could arrange a local event, where you could bring together your local medical media and consumer health journalists to watch the webcast of the press briefing. You could invite local opinion leaders to your meeting, where they would be available for interview by journalists. 

In another new initiative this year, we are also providing on our website a patient information leaflet, entitled ‘Vaginal atrophy – a change with the menopause’. This can be downloaded freely, either by doctors to give to their patients or by women themselves. It has been translated into the same languages as the Recommendations document and so will be available within the next week in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and German. Finally, a clinical slide set for doctors is being prepared and this will also be posted on the website.

We hope that many national societies will choose to use the material provided in their plans to celebrate World Menopause Day – and that many doctors will use it in the future to help their patients.