Average Menopause Age

What is the average age of menopause?

RESPONSE: It is fifty-one years and four months. You've reached menopause when you haven't had your period for twelve consecutive months.

However, menopause is still considered natural and normal for women as young as forty (this was an arbitrarily chosen number). If you reach the change of life before you're forty, it is considered premature.

Some women experience it much later, even into their sixties, but then it is considered late.

Both late and early menopause can cause health problems.

There are four stages of menopause that you may be interested in reading more about. Most people think there are only two stages, perimenopause and menopause, but this isn't true.

Most research advises there are 34 possible signs of menopause which you may experience as intolerable or barely noticeable.

What is surprising is that even with improvements with nutrition and quality of life and even though we are expected to live longer than ever, the age at which we experience menopause has remained virtually unchanged for as long as we have recorded it.

Some conditions can bring on an earlier change of life such as smoking, having had no children, exposure to toxic chemicals, chemotherapy and radiation, epilepsy, and medically treated depression.

Conditions that may delay menopause include obesity, having many children and alcohol use.

The best predictor of when you will go through menopause is the age at which your mother experienced the change of life.