Marcelle Pick explains DHEA, an adrenal hormone that builds estrogen and testosterone. Levels drop starting in your 30s and matter more during perimenopause. Chronic stress pushes your adrenals to make cortisol instead, leaving less DHEA and causing fatigue, muscle loss, and mood shifts.
There's a hormone your adrenals make that affects your energy, your muscle, and your mood, and almost no standard lab panels check it. It's called DHEA, and DHEA is made in your adrenal glands, and it's actually a building block your body uses to make estrogen and testosterone. It naturally starts declining in your 30s, and by the time many women reach perimenopause and beyond, it can be significantly lower than it was a decade earlier. And here's why that matters for this stage of life specifically. As your ovaries produce less estrogen, your body leans more on adrenal hormones like DHEA to help fill part of that gap. So if your adrenals are already taxed from years of chronic stress, you can end up with less backup right when you need it the most. Some functional medicine practitioners describe this as your body's prioritizing cortisol production over DHEA when it's under chronic stress. The 2 share a building block, so ongoing stress can mean less is available for DHEA specifically. Low DHEA is associated with low energy, harder to hold muscle mass, and mood changes, and it's genuinely simple to test. I put together a free guide on DHEA and adrenal health for this stage of life. Link in the bio. Go grab it.
