Young Women Suffer Menopause Symptoms In Silence, Study Says

Many young women entering menopause suffer needlessly from symptoms related to the transition, a new study suggests.

More than half of women aged 30 to 35 have already developed moderate to severe symptoms of impending menopause, researchers found.

These include mood swings, delayed or absent periods, hot flashes, vaginal dryness, painful sex, heart palpitations and frequent urination.

Unfortunately, most wait decades before seeking treatment, under the mistaken belief that menopause symptoms that shouldn’t appear until their 50s, researchers said.

“We had a significant number of women who are typically thought to be too young for perimenopause tell us that they have high levels of perimenopause-related symptoms,” senior researcher Liudmila Zhaunova, director of science at Flo Health Inc., a London-based company that offers a pregnancy and ovulation tracking app.

Perimenopause is the transition period leading to menopause, researchers said.

For the study, researchers analyzed symptoms self-reported by more than 4,400 American women 30 and older who responded to a survey offered online and through the Flo app.

About 55% of women 30 to 35 reported problems that met the criteria for “moderate” or severe” menopause symptoms, researchers report in the journal npj Women’s Health.

That number increased to 64% among women 36 to 40, researchers noted.

But only 4% of women 30 to 35 and 7% of those 36 to 40 said they’d visited a medical professional to discuss menopause symptoms, results show.

“We also demonstrated that over a quarter of respondents in the youngest age group (30–35 years) had been told by a medical professional they were perimenopausal,” researchers wrote in their study.

Psychological symptoms like anxiety, depression and irritability took hold long before the physical symptoms of menopause set in, researchers said. Those symptoms peaked among women 41 to 45, then ebbed to their lowest in women 56 and older.

Physical problems like painful sex, bladder issues and vaginal dryness peaked in women 51 and older, and were lowest in women 30 to 35, researchers said.

Likewise, the “classic” symptoms of menopause like hot flashes peaked in women 51 to 55, and were least common among women 30 to 35.

Researchers said they hope their results will help fill an “alarming gap” in the understanding of perimenopause symptoms among younger women.

“This study is important because it plots a trajectory of perimenopausal symptoms that tells us what symptoms we can expect when and alerts us to the fact that women are experiencing perimenopausal symptoms earlier than we expected,” researcher Dr. Jennifer Payne, an expert in reproductive psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, said in a news release.

More information

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has more on menopause.

SOURCES: University of Virginia, news release, Feb. 25, 2025; npj Women’s Health, Feb. 25, 2025

Source: HealthDay