Dr. Betty Murray explains that menopause isn't about losing estrogen but about how it fluctuates. Perimenopause is a chaotic "bungee-cord" period of wild swings. After menopause, when the "egg carton is empty," women end up with less estrogen than men.
Most people think of menopause as a loss of estrogen, right? And so we actually make 3 different estrogens, but I'm going to use the simple term of estrogen. So estrogen is a hormone that obviously fluctuates throughout the course of our life and fluctuates throughout the month, which is part of the 2 hormones that affect our cycles every month. So perimenopause is the time of chaos. I like to call it a bungee cord. You know, one minute it's up, the next minute it's down, it's all over the place. And it truly is the loss of estrogen that signals the loss of ovarian function, so we no longer have eggs in our ovaries. So think of it as the carton is empty and estrogen declines. And actually, a woman in menopause has lower levels of estrogen than a man.
