Dr. Mary Claire Haver

what cycle day you're having the blood drawn.

If you're not having regular cycles, it's really nonspecific and not all that helpful to make that final determination of perimenopause.

So how do we do it?

You're going to be shocked here.

We're going to talk to you.

We're going to write down your symptoms.

We're going to believe that these are actually happening.

We're going to do blood work, probably to rule out things that look a lot like perimenopause, like inflammatory disorders, like autoimmune disease, like hypothyroidism.

We do about 70 labs on our patients when they come in.

One, I'm checking metabolic markers, insulin resistance, etc.,

And surprise, guess what goes up 20% across the menopause transition during perimenopause?

Your LDL, your low density lipoprotein.

I can remember being blindsided by my own blood work.

Okay, here I am living my best life, working out, eating what I think is healthy and thin, naturally thin.

And lo and behold, my cholesterol starts ticking up.

My total cholesterol and my LDL, my HDL stayed stable, started going up no matter what I did.

I just remember being absolutely flabbergasted.

When I opened the menopause clinic and all I did was take care of women in perimenopause and postmenopause,

I remember like every morning opening up to review labs and saying,

everyone has high cholesterol, like 85%.