Age and Period Recovery

“I’m 40+ years old – is it too late for me to recover my missing period?” “I’m 37, is it too late?” “I’m 32 and want to get pregnant is it too late?”

My general answer to this question is that if you have hypothalamic amenorrhea, and it’s not something else that’s causing your missing period, it is NEVER too early or too late to get it back. (The earlier the better, from a long term health perspective!)

There was recently a woman in my support group who got her period back following the NPNW recovery plan who was 48. If you haven’t gone through menopause yet (which you can tell from your FSH and LH levels, book a bloodwork consult with me if you would like to discuss), and you definitively do not have PCOS, hyperprolactinemia or one of the other non hypothalamic related causes of missing periods, there isn’t much reason you CAN’T get it back.

I have data that can help answer this question from the survey I did for No Period. Now What?  It’s important to understand when looking at these data that the vast majority who took this survey were hoping for pregnancy. Many worked on recovery for an amount of time (typically between 3-8 months) and if they didn’t get a natural period, moved on to fertility treatments. The recovery rate in this data set was 55% – but the overall period recovery rate in these same women after pregnancy and breastfeeding was 98%. Those who did not get a period during this effort at recovery were almost all able to recover periods at a later time.

Percent of women at each birth year with a recovered period (those without a period went on to fertility treatments). Number of respondents per year is in parentheses. Years with fewer than 5 respondents were combined as shown.

First, here are recovery rates during this initial phase by year of birth. This survey was completed in 2012-2013, so the oldest person, born in 1968, was approximately 44 at the time of the survey, the youngest was 17.

Recovery rates by birth year bounce between ~40-70% across the years, without any consistent pattern. So my conclusion is that age does not impact your ability to restore your menstrual cycles. 🙂

The next question is, does time to recovery vary by age? I have previously found that time to recovery is NOT correlated with length of time periods have been missing. So now let’s look at year of birth versus recovery time.

Months to recovery versus birth year. Each person is shown as a blue dot; the red dashed line shows the overall trend.

Interestingly these data do suggest a somewhat longer time to recovery in those who are older. When I look at the median time to recovery it decreases from 7 months in those born from 1975-1979 to 5 months in those born 1980 or later.

This could be because our brains are less malleable, slower to change. It could be that there is more overall stress as one gets older and tends to have more responsibilities. Could be a whole host of reasons.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is while it might take slightly longer to recover a missing period / recover from hypothalamic amenorrhea, there is no indication that your current age plays a role in ability to recover.

Hopefully this provides more hope and motivation to keep working toward recovery!

Useful links:

Support group

Book an appointment for guidance on your individual case

Period recovery self-paced course

HA registry study at the Mayo clinic

P.S. If you have comments or questions about this post, or if you appreciated this post and would like to support more of the same, please join my support group!