- Vasomotor symptoms
How to track hot flashes so a clinician can actually act on it
Frequency, severity, and time of day are the three things a hot-flash record needs. Here is why, and how to capture them without turning your day into admin.
- Appointments
What to bring to a menopause appointment
Ten-minute consultations reward preparation. What to write down beforehand, what your clinician needs from you, and the questions worth asking.
- Stages
Perimenopause, menopause, surgical menopause and POI: the differences
Four different situations that get called the same thing. How each is defined, how each is diagnosed, and why the distinction changes what is worth tracking.
- Routes
Estradiol delivery routes and what changes about tracking each
Patch, gel, spray, tablet, vaginal, implant. What is different about each route from a record-keeping point of view — and the adherence question each one raises.
- Sleep & mood
Tracking sleep and mood through the menopause transition
Sleep and mood are the two symptoms most often dismissed as unrelated. Separating night waking from night sweats is what makes the pattern legible.
- Templates
A menopause symptom diary template that survives past week two
The structure of a diary that gets filled in every day — plus a printable version and the four fields most diaries are missing.
- Side effects
Side effects and changes worth writing down
What to record when something new starts, which details make the note useful, and the symptoms that mean stop logging and get urgent care.
- Gender-affirming care
Tracking gender-affirming HRT: what to log and why
Feminizing and masculinizing regimens, what published guidance says about monitoring, and how to keep a record that travels between providers.
Why tracking is the load-bearing part of menopause care
For most people over 45, menopause is diagnosed on symptoms rather than on a blood test. NICE guideline NG23 is explicit about this: in women aged over 45 with menopausal symptoms, perimenopause and menopause should be diagnosed without laboratory tests. Follicle-stimulating hormone testing has a defined but narrow role — it is considered in people aged 40 to 45 with symptoms including a change in cycle, and in those under 40 where premature ovarian insufficiency is suspected.
That has a practical consequence that surprises people. Your account of your symptoms is the diagnostic evidence. Not a supporting detail — the main input. And symptom accounts given from memory in a short appointment are unreliable in a specific, well-understood direction: they compress. The last bad week overwrites the previous three good ones, whatever actually happened.
A record fixes that. It also does something a single appointment cannot: it shows change over time. Whether a symptom is easing, holding, or worsening is often the question that matters most, and it is unanswerable without a baseline.
The four things worth recording, whatever your situation
- Symptoms, with severity and not just presence
- A tick beside "hot flashes" tells a clinician almost nothing. Frequency and severity on a consistent scale tell them whether anything is moving. The hot-flash guide goes into what to capture and why.
- What you actually took, and when
- Adherence is not a moral question, it is diagnostic information. A regimen that is not being followed as intended looks exactly like a regimen that is not working. Different delivery routes fail in different ways — a patch that lifts off in the shower is a different problem from a gel applied at inconsistent times.
- Sleep, separately from night sweats
- Waking because you are drenched and waking for no apparent reason point in different directions. Logging them as one thing loses the distinction. See sleep and mood tracking.
- Anything new, with its start date
- New symptoms after a change in therapy are the most useful entries in a whole log — and the ones most often lost. The side-effects guide covers what makes a note usable and what warrants urgent care instead of a note.
How the HRT AI app fits
HRT AI is the iPhone app these guides come from. It exists because paper diaries and note apps both fail at the same point: month three, when the novelty has gone and you are still meant to be writing things down. So the check-in is deliberately small — hot flashes, night sweats, sleep, mood, brain fog, anxiety, joint ache, breast tenderness, vaginal dryness, libido, energy and bleeding pattern, one tap each, on short 1-to-5 scales — and the card closes the moment you save. You can add your own symptoms too, for the things no app's fixed list includes.
Everything else is derived from those taps. The weekly summary names what changed and what held steady. The clinician report is a single page: current regimen, dose changes over six months, twelve weeks of hot-flash trend and symptom averages, a ninety-day bleeding calendar, recent labs against typical ranges, and the questions you flagged for the visit. Reminders follow the shape of the regimen rather than a fixed daily alarm, which matters if yours runs sequentially rather than continuously.
It supports perimenopause, natural and surgical menopause, premature ovarian insufficiency, and gender-affirming hormone therapy across thirteen delivery routes — estradiol patches, gel, spray, oral, sublingual, vaginal preparations and injections, micronized progesterone and other progestogens, testosterone, antiandrogens, and non-hormonal options. It also ships a library of 53 referenced articles. Your health data stays on the device; no account is required, and the weekly summary is generated on-device. What it will not do is tell you what to take. See the editorial standards for why that line exists in the software as well as the writing.