STUDY ANALYSIS: Half of US Women Aged 30-35 Experiencing Early Menopause

This isn't normal

It’s been a little while since I’ve hit you with one of my “study analyses,” so here’s one on a subject I talk about from time to time and maybe not as much as I should: women’s health. This one is about disturbances to younger women’s reproductive cycles, and a worrying new survey which suggests significant numbers of women in their thirties are now entering the menopause early. This is almost certainly to do, among other things, with pervasive exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals, a subject I’ve written at length about and which also forms one of the main topics in my new book The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, which is dropping in May via Passage Press. As I’ve said before—borrowing the title from the 2022 Tucker Carlson documentary I starred in—“the end of men is the end of women”: the causes of the frightening health and fertility decline in men affect women just as badly. This is a shared fight.

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Half of all women in their 30s are now reporting early symptoms of the menopause. This is not normal, and it’s not good.

The menopause is when adult women finally stop having periods. It’s also referred to as “the climacteric” and typically occurs between the ages of 45 to 55. It’s a natural change and marks the end of a woman’s ability to conceive.

Women generally shouldn’t be experiencing the onset of the menopause in their thirties—certainly not a full half of the female population at that age, anyway. But that’s precisely what a new survey suggests.

The survey, commissioned by researchers from Flo Health and the University of Virginia, looked at around 4,500 women, and found that half of all women in the 30-35 age bracket reported experiencing symptoms of early menopause or “perimenopause,” to give the condition its technical name. Over 55% of 30-35 year olds reported “moderate to severe” symptoms, increasing to 64.3% in women between the ages of 36 and 40.

“Physical and emotional symptoms associated with perimenopause are understudied and often dismissed by physicians. This research is important in order to more fully understand how common these symptoms are, their impact on women, and to raise awareness amongst physicians as well as the general public,” says study co-author Dr. Jennifer Payne.

The strength of perimenopause symptoms can vary, but the main change is extended durations without periods. In “early” perimenopause, women occasionally miss their period or cycle irregularly, whereas in “late” perimenopause, they may go for much longer—from between 60 days to a full year or more—without a period.

Other symptoms associated with perimenopause include: hot flashes; vaginal dryness; pain during sexual intercourse; recent cycle length irregularity; heart palpitations; frequent urination.

The survey and discussion don’t go into causes, they merely establish the trends themselves and their implications for public health, but one obvious potential cause is exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. These are ubiquitous chemicals, found in everything from deodorants to food packaging, that interfere with the body’s natural hormonal balance, with potentially catastrophic effects. Endocrine disruptors are linked to pretty much every chronic disease you can think of—diabesity, cancer, reproductive issues, neurological degeneration, you name it.