Predicting Your Menopause Age: What Factors Matter

It’s a query many ladies marvel about, particularly should you’re serious about planning a household and your 20s are however a distant reminiscence.

How many extra years of fertility may you will have, and the way for much longer will or not it’s earlier than you begin experiencing “the change?”

Here’s what does — and doesn’t affect the age at when a lady reaches menopause.

The Top Factor

There are a variety of elements that have an effect on ladies’s age at menopause, however one is extra vital than another: the age their mom skilled menopause.

“Menopause is strongly genetically linked, so you’re very likely to fall within a few years either way of the age your mother was at menopause,” says Nanette Santoro, MD, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility on the University of Colorado-Denver School of Medicine.

This isn’t all the time true, in fact. Some ladies attain menopause at an unusually early age — earlier than 45 or so — with no recognized trigger, which might be the results of an inherited challenge or a one-time genetic mutation. “These can be random events, but can also be passed on,” says Howard Zacur, MD, PhD, who directs the reproductive endocrinology and infertility division at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

So if your mother reached menopause at 40, but her sisters and your grandmother were all around the average age of 50, it’s unclear whether you’ll follow your mother’s path or theirs.

But if most of the women in your family, your mother included, reach menopause early, late, or somewhere in the middle, you can eye your calendar with some degree of confidence.

Menopause Age: 4 More Influences

Your mother’s age at menopause is a key factor, but not the only one. Here are four others to consider:

1. Smoking. No other lifestyle factor does more damage to your ovaries than smoking. So if you smoke and your mother didn’t, you’ll probably reach menopause earlier than she did. If she smoked and you don’t, you probably reach menopause later than she did.
2. Chemotherapy. Most forms of chemotherapy used in younger women are at least mildly toxic to the ovaries. Many women go through temporary menopause while undergoing chemotherapy; if cycles do return (they don’t always), you can still expect to reach regular menopause a couple of years earlier than you otherwise would have.
3. Ovarian surgery. “The more you operate on the ovaries, the more healthy tissue gets damaged,” says Marcelle Cedars, MD, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology on the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. So should you’ve had diagnostic surgical procedure for endometriosis, for instance, Cedars recommends utilizing medical choices (corresponding to hormonal suppression) to deal with the situation with a purpose to keep away from repetitive surgical procedures.

Not a Factor

Here are three belongings you may assume would affect menopause age, however don’t:

1. Age at first interval. Although the typical age of the primary interval has been getting youthful in U.S. ladies, there hasn’t been a corresponding shift within the common age at menopause. The common age the primary interval is now about 12.4 years previous, down from 13.3 in ladies born previous to the Twenties, however the common age at menopause has been round 51.5 for many years. “You would assume that a woman only has so many cycles in her life and if she menstruates later, she’ll reach menopause later, but that doesn’t seem to be true,” Cedars says.
2. Pregnancy and breastfeeding. These haven’t any affect on menopause age.
3. Hormonal contraception strategies. “Even if you’re using a birth control method that stops ovulation, it doesn’t stop the loss of follicles, the constant process of the ovary taking them from the resting pool of eggs,” Cedars says. “All the follicles available in the cohort that month die away, even if you’re not ovulating, so birth control doesn’t appear to delay menopause.”
4. Ethnicity. A study of premenopausal and early perimenopausal women found that race/ethnicity played no role in what age the women experienced menopause. The Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN) looked at cross section of women from different races from seven states and found that most of the women experienced menopause between the ages of 52 and 54.

There is no way to delay menopause; it can only be sped up, not slowed down, by external factors.

Some factors are still unknowns. For instance, some research links exposure to certain “endocrine-disrupting” chemical compounds to earlier age at menopause. But it’s not sure that these chemical compounds trigger earlier menopause, for the reason that analysis solely reveals an affiliation and doesn’t rule out different doable causes. Overall, the standard age when menopause begins hasn’t modified a lot over time that these chemical compounds have been round.

Predicting Menopause Age

Other than avoiding smoking, there’s in all probability not a lot you are able to do to affect the age at which you’ll attain menopause. But as you get nearer to that point, it will likely be simpler to foretell extra precisely when it can occur.

“If you’re over the age of 45 and skip no less than three intervals in a row, that tells us that you just’re going to maneuver on to menopause comparatively quickly,” Santoro says. “But we’re still working on blood tests to see if we can predict this more accurately.”