You definitely know about menopause, you may know about perimenopause, but do you know about the late reproductive phase?
Like so much in women’s health, there’s a lot to learn about the menopausal transition. Most women think this stage of life is when the ovaries stop producing estrogen, which is true, but only part of the story.
For years before that final stage, women experience symptoms like disrupted sleep, changes in menstrual flow, and irritability. These are due to subtler hormonal shifts now referred to as the late reproductive phase. A stage that affects women in their late thirties to early forties before they hit perimenopause. The key difference between these stages is that periods cycle regularly during the initial phase and become irregular during perimenopause. And perimenopause comes with its own host of unpleasant symptoms like vaginal dryness, skipped periods, and hot flashes.
Why is this important? Understanding that these symptoms are part of a normal life transition gives us a better understanding of our overall health. If you’re 39 and start feeling overwhelming anxious, you may go to your doctor looking for an anxiety-disorder diagnosis– and you might get one, when in fact it’s your hormonal imbalance that’s to blame rather than your stress management skills.
If your doctor isn’t aware that anxiety is a symptom of the late reproductive stage– which most are not– he may fail to ask you if you have the related symptoms, completely glossing over the fact that your anxiety may be a biological life stage that many women in their late thirties experience. This leads to misdiagnosis, potentially having you think you now have something much more serious, like a mental health condition, and may lead to the wrong kinds of medications.
We produce a show called Empowered Health, a podcast focused on navigating women's health, we just released an episode exploring the ways your body changes before your periods become irregular, a newly identified stage in a woman’s life known as the late reproductive phase, which is the run-up to perimenopause and menopause.
Our host speaks with experts Dr. Marcie Richardson, Dr. Nancy Woods and women’s health advocate Nina Coslov to better understand what we know and what remains unclear about the period before perimenopause. Richardson has been a practicing OB-GYN for decades, and Woods began the Seattle Midlife Women’s Health Study in 1989 to better understand the menopausal transition and early postmenopause. Coslov has collaborated with both on the Women Living Better website.
This episode kicks off a four-part series on the menopausal transition, starting with this one on the late reproductive phase. Our second episode was released yesterday, where we look at perimenopause's relationships with hormone therapy and then dive into the final stage: menopause and what the research is telling us. We’ll round out the series with a fun conversation with famed anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, known for coming up with the Grandmother Hypothesis, which many consider to be one of the most important breakthroughs in evolutionary biology in the last half-century.
Figured this subreddit might be interested, here's links to the first episode:
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