IS THERE ANYTHING WOMEN CAN DO TO AVOID PERIMENOPAUSE?

 

Dr Steven R. Goldstein is a Perimenopause Specialist in NYC who has helped thousands of women navigate the difficult stage of life called Perimenopause (the decade or so before menopause). Some patients ask whether there is anything a woman can do to delay the onset of Perimenopause, perhaps because their mothers and old sisters went through menopause in their forties.

 

It is impossible to say how much of perimenopause / menopause is genetic. Certainly, when a woman says that her mother and both of her older sisters went through their “changes” in their early forties, it is understandable why she thinks she will as well.

 

Dr Goldstein usually tells his patients that genes are incredibly powerful. Although menopause is not like blue eyes (if your mother and father both have blue eyes, you will definitely have blue eyes), one should never underestimate its hereditary component. However, there is no question that most things have a genetic predisposition and then need environmental influences to cause their expression.

 Some of the other factors that seem to be good predictors that a woman will reach menopause slightly younger than her peers include:

  

 Smoking cigarettes, especially more than half a pack a day

·        Being more than ten pounds underweight
·        Having had surgery to remove all or part of an ovary
·        Having been treated for cancer with chemotherapy or abdominal-radiation therapy.

 

The median age of the onset of perimenopause is 47.5, though it can start earlier or later. As many as 70 percent of women in their forties experience a change in their menstrual cycles. About 35 percent of women experience their first episodes of depression during perimenopause. Twenty to forty percent complain of sleep problems. Up to fifty percent ultimately experience hot flashes as they get close to actual menopause. And yes, there are women who experience nothing at all. There are also women who do not attribute these symptoms to their changing patterns of ovulation and never seek medical intervention or even tell their medical doctors about what they’re experiencing psychologically.

 

All in all, there are many women who avoid the roller coaster of transition or whose symptoms are very mild.

 

Dr Steven R. Goldstein,  a Perimenopause Specialist in NYC, and past President of the International Menopause Society, past President of the North American Menopause Society, is a Certified Menopause Practitioner and co-author of the book “Could it be….Perimenopause?” If you are a woman in her late thirties or forties and going through this phase of subtle symptoms such as period irregularities, then a consultation with Dr Goldstein may be in order.