Dr. Carrie Jones explains that perimenopause has no lab test; doctors diagnose it by age and symptoms. Progesterone drops first, triggering brain fog, sleep problems, mood swings, and heavier periods before hot flashes arrive later.
There's no test to determine perimenopause. Just as you said, we use symptoms and age. So late 30s into your 50s, and you are starting to experience hormonal changes. Early perimenopause, we tend to see the brain fog kicks in some, the sleep issues start, the mood issues start. Women may notice some weight gain, maybe some joint pain or muscle pain that comes and goes. The hot flashes, the night sweats, the vaginal symptoms, they don't usually come until a little later when estrogen drops because progesterone drops first. So this is where we start to see heavier periods, worse pms, can't sleep now. It's getting chalked up to, that's just your period, that's just hormones. And it is. But it is your body shifting through perimenopause. And then as you move through and you skip more cycles, and you skip more cycles, you're losing that estrogen, and that's when you feel things start to dry out. So the women will say, my skin is changing, my hair is changing, my joints are changing. Everything feels sort of dry, except I'm having night sweats. Like, make it make sense. I'm like, I know, it's all this hormone shift.
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