A compendium of information on the mysterious period before menopause hits

Below are the articles on perimenopause that we found trustworthy and interesting enough to include in our daily newsletter on women’s health. We will continue updating this compendium as we come across more meaningful information on perimenopause.

Keep In Mind: You Can Still Get Pregnant in Perimenopause!

The Atlantic’s Rachel Gross explains that surprise pregnancies are relatively common for women over 40. That’s because perimenopause is “like the hormonal chaos of puberty, when the ovaries first sputter to life, wreaking all sorts of bodily havoc as they try to figure out their new groove…Only now they’re in overdrive.” In other words, you may actually become more fertile (i.e. by releasing more eggs) as your body responds to menopausal changes.

Gross reports that while the odds of getting pregnant are lower in your 40s, surprise pregnancies arise when women assume they can’t get pregnant because of their age, even if they still have their period.

Consider Taking Estrogen Hormone Therapy — But For Dementia

The Wall Street Journal digs into a meta-analysis on menopausal hormone therapy, which has seen lots of conflicting information over the years. Sumathi Reddy writes that “the findings don’t resolve the debate” around hormone therapy but gives “one of the most thorough answers for what we know now. Younger women who started taking estrogen-only hormone therapy during perimenopause or early menopause had a 32% reduced risk of developing dementia compared with women not taking anything.“

TLDR on this: Talk to your doctor about estrogen hormone therapy if you feel you are entering or in perimenopause, and especially if you have a family history of dementia.

“Not Feeling Like Myself”

The Washington Post has a deep dive on the symptoms of perimenopause, and how little science knows about the transition to menopause while women are still getting their periods. Marcie Richardson, a gynecologist from the Boston area, says she often sees women in their 30s and 40s who say they are “not feeling like myself.”

Often, those words show up as symptoms like fatigue, insomnia, mood changes and feeling overwhelmed. Richardson teamed up with other experts to conduct a survey of over 1,300 women, ages 35 to 55, to ask questions about menstrual cycles and health. They found that those who said they didn’t feel like themselves were not correlated with the most well-known symptoms of menopause–hot flashes and vaginal dryness. And that suggests that there is another phase of symptoms that can occur before the last period takes place. Or in other words, as hormones begin to shift ahead of menopause, women can feel it.