… while still getting monthly periods.
Disrupted sleep and mood changes at 42 — were these menopause-related?
Initially, we didn’t think so. Neither did our healthcare providers.
Women Living Better was born of our personal experiences with what felt like all-of-the-sudden sleep and mood changes. These arose without corresponding changes in our lives or bodies to explain them. We felt certain something biological had shifted. However, as we were then in our early 40s, we assumed we were too young for menopause-related changes and besides we were still getting periods every month. Visits with our healthcare providers — both primary care physicians and ObGyns — confirmed this.
So what then was causing sleep and mood symptoms in our early 40s?
From the scientific research, we learned two things:
- There wasn’t much research on the effects of changing hormonal patterns for women under 45
- What little research there was, suggested that menopause-related changes did happen before dramatic changes in cycles and periods that are usually associated with menopause. And these changes occurred in the early 40s (even late 30s in some cases)! We reached out to some experts we identified and what we learned drew us into a multi-year project.
In the eight years since then, we have been on a mission to create a better understanding of this earliest part of the menopause transition.
We’ve connected with additional experts and read lots of scientific research. We created womenlivingbetter.org to share what we’ve learned in the hopes of educating women to expect these changes, explain why they happen, and help them feel less alone during this sometimes-tumultuous phase of life. Additionally, we encourage women to share their experiences via surveys, forms, and reader polls so we can aggregate them, share them back, and begin to understand better what is going on for a larger sample of many women. And we’ve created a research collaboration to focus on this earliest part of the path to menopause called the Late Reproductive Stage (LRS).
Before we got started we read up on all of the longitudinal studies of perimenopause that had been done before. This post outlines those studies most of which began in the 1990s. Before that very little research focused on this time in our lives.
Our first research was a scoping review of all the research that had investigated the Late Reproductive Stage. As we suspected, very little attention had been paid to this stage. You can find the published paper here. We think it’s an important missing piece that will lead to women being better supported and ultimately healthier as we age.
Much of what we turned up in the Scoping Review was research focused on fertility. As women are delaying childbearing, fertility becomes a challenge and so a good deal of research effort has focused on fertility. This led us to realize that the Late Reproductive Stage actually represents three groups of women with different goals; one group focused on extending fertility; a second group focused on extending fertility and managing menopause transition (MT) symptoms and a third group focused on managing MT symptoms and for some a goal of preventing pregnancy as well.
Ideally: Three Groups, Better Understood and Supported
- Our vision is that there will be three well-recognized groups of women in the Late Reproductive Stage: those focused on extending fertility, those focused on extending fertility and managing menopause transition (MT) symptoms and those focused on managing MT symptoms.
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At WLB, we aim to create a clearer picture of the symptom experiences during the LRS.
- Right now, too many of us have experiences that aren’t validated because the research hasn’t been done and what is known has not been widely disseminated. We are doing this research.
One day soon women will know that menopause-related changes can begin before age 45 — and so will their healthcare providers!
One Last Thing
We’ve made lots of progress. And we have more to do!
Please support our work if you can.
References
1. Nancy Fugate Woods, “The U.S. Women’s Health Research Agenda for the Twenty-First Century,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25, no. 4 (Summer, 2000): 1269-1274.