The average age of the onset of menopause is 51, plus or minus several years either way. Some women experience menopause in their thirties, and some won’t reach that stage until their sixties.

As you can see, there’s a lot of leeway, and it’s not really much help to draw a line at a particular age and state that to be the age of menopause.

It’s a lottery.

Some women experience menopause in their thirties, and some won’t reach that stage until their sixties. You can blame your grandmothers if you wish, the average age of menopause onset will be related to when your mother reached menopause. The perimenopause stage is one year to several years before menstrual periods stop.

Most of us begin experiencing symptoms of hormone imbalance anywhere from our early thirties to our late forties. You can get a fair idea by finding out your mother’s age at menopause, and the folktale of ‘late start - early finish‘ seems to hold true. Of course there are other factors related to environment but you get the gist.

Menopause symptoms can range from mild hot spells at night to constant dripping sweats all day and night. My mother used to ’smell heat’ and I get ‘heat in my head’, whatever imagery may be expressed you can be sure it’s the internal thermostat misfiring.

smokers reach menopause earlier…

Some women spot for a few months, others bleed heavily for years. These symptoms are mostly caused by different hormonal combinations as we approach the time of the Change. A list has been drawn up by a collective of menopausal women, find your information in 35 Symptoms of Menopause

The severity level of your menopausal symptoms is very much connected to your stress level, your diet, the amount of exercise that you get, and the environmental toxins you’re exposed to on a daily basis. Smokers show an average age of menopause several years earlier than their non-smoking sister

Surgical menopause

Women who have both their ovaries removed surgically experience an abrupt menopause, and are so often experience more severe symptoms than are those who experience it naturally. The risk of heart disease is higher, hot flushes may be hotter (!) and more frequent, and women have a higher chance of suffering depression.No one knows why this is, and it becomes even more confusing. When only one ovary is removed, menopause usually occurs naturally. When the uterus is removed in an hysterectomy but the ovaries remain, menstrual periods stop but other menopausal symptoms usually occur at the same age that they would naturally occur. And not every woman is the same.

As I said, it’s a lottery.

Tags: hysterectomy, popular, stress, tobacco