Perimenopause Can Start In Your 30s. This Is the Sneaky First Sign That Most Women Miss - Women's Health

When Fiona Byrne entered her 30s, her body started to change. Despite never experiencing acne as a teen, she suddenly had cystic pimples at 32. Then, a few years later, by her mid-30s, her nails became unusually brittle, she started getting dizzy on escalators, her skin itched, and her periods fell closer together. Around 40, she was waking up at 3 a.m. with night sweats, and her hair, which had always been silky, was inexplicably dry. At that point, she started doing some research to connect the dots of this growing constellation of symptoms, and when she finally met with a menopause expert, she got her answer: she was in perimenopause. “It had been years and years of weird stuff before I had any clue that it was hormone-related. If I knew in my late 30s, I would have been on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) immediately,” says Byrne, now 49—and still in perimenopause. Most women hit menopause around age 51 or 52, says Mariya Rozenfeld, DO, an ob-gyn and Menopause Society Certified Practitioner (MSCP)—the gold standard certification for physicians who treat patients with menopause—at NYU Langone.