Research index
Three ways to measure perimenopause, not one opinion
Most sites mention that perimenopause is under-discussed and move on. We measured it three ways instead: what women type into Google, what they say to each other on Reddit, and how a validated clinical scale scores what you are feeling against a real reference population. Three different instruments, three different blind spots, and every page below names its own rather than hiding it.
Free. No email required. No signup required. Takes about 2 minutes. Scored entirely in your browser: your answers are never stored or sent anywhere. Your score is shown next to the average for your age band.
Three instruments, three blind spots
A single number is easy to fake and easy to misread. Three independent ones that roughly agree are harder to argue with, so that is what we built instead of one clean statistic.
- What women search for. 301,000 US searches a month for perimenopause against 165,000 for menopause, five years of Google Trends, and 47 symptoms priced by what advertisers actually bid on them. It also names the 8 symptoms Google's own tool returned no number for, including anxiety and joint pain, rather than publishing a ranking that pretends to be complete. Read the statistics.
- What women say to each other. A full year of r/Perimenopause, 22,243 posts and 387,609 comments, plus 1.16 million comments read from r/ADHDwomen for the 231 threads where a stranger is the one who first hands a woman the word. Anxiety outranks hot flashes here by a wide margin. Read the study.
- Where you sit against a reference population. The other two are ours. This one is not: the Menopause Rating Scale is a peer-reviewed instrument with published reference values for US women aged 40 to 70. This page runs the arithmetic in your browser and hands back where your three domain scores sit against that average. Use the calculator.
What scale actually buys you
A content mill can restate a guideline. It cannot hand read 386 machine-flagged threads to manually verify 231 of them, or publish the 22 keywords its own tool refused to return a number for, because both cost real hours and neither makes the page look more finished. The gaps are part of what makes the rest of it worth trusting.
That is also why every figure on the two research pages above names its own sample size and its own method, and why the statistics page has a section titled plainly what we could not measure, rather than quietly leaving the eight hardest symptoms out of the ranking.
What none of this proves
None of it is prevalence data for the general population, and none of it is medical advice. Reddit skews toward people whose symptoms got bad enough to ask strangers online, so vote counts measure resonance within that group, not how common a symptom is everywhere. Search volume measures what a term is worth to an advertiser, not how many people have the symptom behind it. Read each page's own method section before quoting a number out of it.
Common questions
What research does perigirlies publish?
Three kinds. A statistics page measuring five years of US search demand across 47 symptoms, an original study of a full year of Reddit posts and comments about perimenopause, and an interactive calculator for the Menopause Rating Scale, a peer-reviewed clinical instrument with published reference values. All three are free to read, and the first two are free to quote with credit.
Is the perigirlies Reddit study peer-reviewed?
No, and the study says so. It is original analysis of 22,243 posts and 387,609 comments from r/Perimenopause over one year, plus 1.16 million comments from r/ADHDwomen, with the method, sample and limits published alongside the findings. It is not a clinical or prevalence study: the community it draws from skews toward people whose symptoms were severe enough to bring them to strangers online.
What is the Menopause Rating Scale?
An 11-item, three-domain scale developed and validated outside this site, with published reference values from a peer-reviewed methodological review. The calculator on this site takes your three domain subtotals, checks the arithmetic, and compares your score against the published US average, entirely in your browser.
Can I quote the numbers on these pages?
Yes. The statistics page and the Reddit study are both free to quote with credit to perigirlies.com and a link where the medium allows one. Both pages publish their sample sizes and their method alongside the figures, so a quote can carry its own source.
Perimenopause symptoms
The stages of perimenopauseThe numbers exist. So does the two-minute version
Nineteen symptoms across four domains, plus your cycle, scored against the average for your age band and printable for the appointment.
Every figure here has a sample size attached. Yours can too.
Take the 2-minute checkFree, no email, no signup. Scored entirely in your browser. Screening, not diagnosis. No provider is linked from this page and nothing on it is sponsored.