“Perimenopause and Menopause?”

Yes, you are perimenopausal, unless you had an FSH level drawn and it put you in the menopause range.

Medicine is very confusing when it comes to the definitions of perimenopause vs menopause. Perimenopause is the ‘year before menopause’ and Menopause is ‘a year without periods’; so you can see how confusing that really is. As a doctor who writes books to help women decipher these definitions, I feel I have a little expertise in this area. Actually, the best way to help you through perimenopause is to realize that your female hormone levels will naturally go up and down and your periods will be irregular, both too close and too far apart as well as skipping for months at a time before kicking in again. I follow my patients with levels of their female hormones and help track those levels with their symptoms and then adjust bio-identical hormones to help with their roller-coaster of how they feel one month to the next. Many women will even go more than a year without bleeding and then kick back in and start to bleed again; it’s hard to make sense of a biologic system that just doesn’t have an ‘on-off’ switch. I encourage you to check out my book, Full Bloom: Perimenopause, Menopause and Beyond as I put a lot of the science of this time into an easy to read step by step ‘how to’ handle this crazy time; it’s available on Amazon for only $20. I also highly encourage you to consider bio-identical hormones due to your seizure disorder; many patients with seizures actually have less seizures keeping their hormone levels intact and balanced. In fact, in the European literature, Progesterone is the drug of choice in a traumatic brain injury; that’s what seizures are considered is originating from a traumatic tissue event, either vascular or electrical in the brain that triggers the seizure; this is certainly traumatic!

Good morning,

Yes, menopause is one full year with no bleeding.