Not Knowing If It Counts: The Perimenopause Uncertainty Study

Key Takeaways

• ✦Perimenopause uncertainty — not knowing whether your symptoms are perimenopause or something else — is now recognized in peer-reviewed research as a clinically meaningful phenomenon, distinct from illness-related uncertainty.
• ✦The uncertainty isn't just uncomfortable; it delays validation, delays care, and has real mental health consequences for women in the transition.
• ✦Compassionate Mind Training (CMT), a structured group intervention rooted in self-compassion and emotion regulation, showed feasibility and early signal for reducing anxiety and low mood in a randomized controlled trial — though a fully powered effectiveness trial still needs to happen.
• ✦Elysium's NR-based supplement generated a headline claiming it "shows promise" for menopause symptoms — but the source is NutraIngredients, a trade publication, not a peer-reviewed journal, and no independent trial data was available at time of publishing.
• ✦For mood and anxiety specifically, non-hormonal, evidence-adjacent options like CMT are worth watching — particularly for women who can't or don't want to use HRT.