Rhonda Patrick· PhD
so obviously what happens in menopause is three hormones that are really important to a woman during her reproductive years go away um and they go away in very short order uh so it's it's it can be quite dramatic um and obviously those hormones are estrogen progesterone and testosterone I always mention testosterone because it's it's easily forgotten but it's important to not forget it because a woman's concentration of testosterone in her uh and by the way testosterone declines slower than estrogen and progesterone estrogen progesterone really go down testosterone kind of gradually goes down but um like right now we're sitting here and you're you know you're 45 presumably uh you know you're you're still in the throws of your reproductive you know you're at the tail end of your reproductive capacity but you haven't hit menopause yet um your testosterone right now is at least 10 times higher than your estrogen level wow in absolute quantities and by the way that's the highest that's if you're ovulating so your Peak estrogen is around ovulation um if I take you in the early follicular cycle or in the ludal cycle your testosterone could be a 100 times higher than your testosterone so it's very important to understand don't get confused by the units on the lab test because they're reporting them in nanograms per deiler versus picograms per milliliter and so the estrogen number looks bigger but in terms of absolute amounts of it testosterone is still the uh by far the most dominant hormone for both men and women so um these things go away and a whole bunch of things happen now in the short run and the things that generally get the most attention of the medical community are these vasomotor symptoms so the hot flashes and the night sweats and these are kind of the first things that women tend to notice I mean they might notice that their period is becoming irregular their cycle is lengthening and things of that nature but in terms of actual symptoms that are disruptive to their quality of life it are these Vasa mutter symptoms so hot flashes and night sweats