Andrea created a menopause symptom survey after learning an app developer claimed dozens of symptoms exist, not just hot flashes. She found over 103 distinct symptoms through community surveys, far more than the 20-something listed in medical journals from the 1970s. The last comprehensive count in clinical literature is decades old.
The first survey that we came up with was in 2022, was our signs and symptoms survey. And the reason that we launched it was because I was at a party with a friend and we were getting caught up on what we were doing, and she was, you know, telling me that she was creating an app for menopause symptoms. And at the time I'm like, an app for menopause symptoms? Like, don't you actually have to have a lot of symptoms to create an app? Like, in my mind there were like 3, you know, like you said, hot flashes, night sweats, sleep issues, or mood swings, 4, or whatever it was. And she was like, no, Andrea, there's so many symptoms, I'm telling you. And I'm like Well, she's like, there's 34 to 40. And I was like, wow, there's that many. And the way my brain works is like, I went home, I created this document, I'm like, okay, I started tracking it. And I looked at the medical journals and I'm looking, looking online and in Facebook groups and just kind of like talking to family and friends. And I was like, whoa, there is a lot more than even 34 to 40. There was like 80, 85 symptoms. So I thought, you know what, I'm gonna start— years later, I was like, you know, let me just go to our community and ask them what their experiencing. And we quickly found out that there's 103+ symptoms. And yeah, the last time any type of quantifiable number of symptoms was published in a medical journal was in the '70s, and at that time it was like something like 20-something.
