What is the difference between perimenopause and menopause?
Dr. Zuleikha Tyebjee, MD, a board-certified family medicine physician, answers this in her recorded menopause masterclass. Every quote below is her exact wording, marked with where it appears in the recording.
How is menopause diagnosed?
“Menopause is pretty easy to diagnose in the sense that it is a year after you have not had a period. So it's got a nice objective timeline. We wait 12 months after that last period as long as it wasn't induced by like a hysterectomy or surgical means.”
How is perimenopause diagnosed?
“perimenopause it's a little bit quote-unquote trickier to diagnose because it is primarily a clinical diagnosis … perimenopause is a diagnosis that a clinician can make regardless of lab work and regardless of period status.”
Can you be in perimenopause if your periods are still regular?
“perimenopause can come when your periods are coming just like normal, but you're having a kind of wide variety of symptoms that we would associate with perimenopause. And those symptoms are primarily driven by wide hormone fluctuations.”
What age does perimenopause start?
“The average age of menopause in the US is 51 to 52. perimenopause typically four to eight years earlier than that. I will say anecdotally, I'm seeing women much earlier showing up in my clinic in their mid to late 30s.”
“Again, that's anecdotal. So you know data shows that it's still probably mid 40s is the average.”
Quotes are taken from the masterclass transcript; “…” marks where words were left out, and nothing was reworded. These pages provide general education, not an individual diagnosis or treatment plan.
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