A clinician describes perimenopause starting earlier than textbooks say, often in the mid-to-late 30s and lasting 10-15 years instead of the traditional 3-5 year window. Declining ovarian hormones combine with stress, diet, toxins, and nutrient gaps to disrupt the brain-ovary connection and monthly cycles.
Today I want to talk about what the heck is perimenopause. So we hear this term a lot, but it's not really well understood because when I went to medical school back in the day, you know, it was described as this three to five year transition period where your progesterone and estrogen levels start to decline. They call it symptoms of hormone deprivation beginning, because menopause is the literal definition of an entire year without a period, usually brought on by the natural decline of ovarian function. Sometimes it's surgical. We remove your ovaries during surgery and you come out of the operating room and you are in menopause because your body is no longer reducing reproductive levels of estrogen and progesterone. So there's a whole transition period before those ovaries stop making reproductive levels of hormones. And like I said, I was taught it was three to five years and that it should be a mild transition. Start having hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, and then you stop having your periods. But I will tell you, over the past 20 years, I have continued to watch this steady, steady increase in symptoms that are occurring longer and longer before menopause. So it used to be these symptoms started around 47, 48, because the average age of menopause is 51. Now I'm constantly seeing perimenopausal symptoms actually beginning in the mid to late 30s. So 10 to 15 years before, before we stop having our periods, we are having symptoms of perimenopause, you know, and so we could either say, yeah, perimenopause is lasting 10 to 15 years, or we could look at it like we're having hormone imbalances for other reasons, long, well before our natural transition into menopause. So that's really what's going on, is you can call it whatever you want. We call it perimenopause because it's easy for women to understand. But essentially, your ovaries are having trouble making their balanced levels of reproductive hormones because of all of the outside turmoil going on, from the foods that we're eating to our chronic physical stressors, our emotional mental stressors, our environmental toxic burdens, so many things, our nutrient deficiencies, these are all making it really hard for our brain and our ovaries to have this discussion and to keep your levels balanced in and in harmony the way they're supposed to cycle every month.
