Is It Possible To Delay The Menopause?

Can You Predict When You'll Enter The Menopause?

While going through the perimenopause and then entering the menopause at any point after age 40 is not considered "premature menopause", a great many women in their early to mid forties would prefer to delay the menopause rather a few years, as they are hoping to have babies and just plain not ready for a new stage of life yet. Can you adequately predict when you'll enter the menopause, then?

The answer, of course, is "not quite", but a few factors give you some idea as to when you are most likely to hit this stage. These factors include:

• The age at which your female relatives, and particularly close female relatives like your mother and sisters, entered the menopause offers a great clue: you're likely to follow the same general pattern they did.
• Your ethnicity plays a role too. Hispanic and African women generally enter the menopause earlier than Caucasian women, who in turn tend to be earlier than Asian women.
• Women who underwent chemotherapy are likely to enter the menopause earlier than other women, even in cases where they were not affected by premature ovarian insufficiency or failure. This also holds true for women who underwent multiple ovarian surgeries.

What If You Want To Delay The Menopause?

So, you want to preserve your fertility and delay the menopause for as long as possible, whether we're talking about premature menopause or "regular" menopause?  You can't change your genetic lineage, or actively prevent the medical conditions that lead to an early menopause, or change your ethnicity, after all!

Saucepans (Don't) Cause Early Menopause

It was all over the news a few years back: chemicals contained in non-stick saucepans and food packaging, including saran wrap, can bring the menopause back years. Is this really true? Well, in a sense. The perfluorocarbons (PFCs) that can be found in these items were indeed linked to premature hormonal disruptions. The study in question analyzed women from the United States whose tap water could have been saturated with PFCs, however, rather than people using old saucepans.

Though experts, including those speaking on behalf of the British National Health Service, make it clear that they believe the general public is highly unlikely to be exposed to such levels of these chemicals as to bring back the menopause, those women whose quality of life isn't affected by not using non-stick saucepans are certainly free to throw them out!

Changing Your Diet

If you have been looking around for ways to delay the menopause, you'll doubtless have come across two very clear bits of advice: consume large amounts of foods with phytoestrogens (such as soy), and eat fish regularly. Because existing studies came to inconsistent conclusions, however, these bits of advice can't be claimed to be fool-proof by any stretch of the imagination.

Likewise, there is some evidence that women with higher caloric intakes (particularly those who also exercise regularly) tend to go through menopause later in life than those on low-calorie diets, but more research is needed to explore the relationship between BMI and the age at which women enter the menopause.

READ Perimenopause Problems: Depression, Bleeding and Weight Control

The Bad Stuff: Alcohol And Smoking

If you've been smoking for a long time and also drink alcohol on a regular basis, you may bring your menopause forward by as much as two years! The relationship between alcohol and smoking and the age at which you will enter menopause exists — much more clearly than the relationship between diet and menopause, or saucepans and menopause. If you want to delay the age at which you enter the menopause, not smoking and drinking alcohol in moderation or not at all represents the most proactive step you can take. On the other hand, regular tea drinkers tend to enter the menopause slightly later.