As an investigative journalist, I interviewed specialists from across the Netherlands working in this field — from leading gynaecologists and endocrinologists to psychiatrists, immunologists and gut health specialists. This taught me to look across disciplines, something individual specialists, by definition, don’t tend to do, and more and more pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Then, when I received the extensive results of the iGene DNA test I had taken myself, I finally understood what had gone wrong for me around the age of forty. That raised an interesting question: what would happen if we compared the results of a large number of women experiencing perimenopausal symptoms? I found an enthusiastic research partner in Eveline van der Wel, MD, iGene’s specialist in DNA interpretation. She shared my belief that telling these women simply to “work on their lifestyle first” didn’t do justice to the complexity of what they were experiencing.

Every woman responds differently to hormonal changes. How your body produces and metabolises oestrogen, how hormones interact with neurotransmitters, how sensitive your stress system is, and how quickly you break down histamine are all influenced to a significant extent by your DNA. What works for one woman may have the opposite effect in another.

After analysing more than 200 women, we identified six clusters. We compared these results with a control group consisting of all DNA profiles in the iGene database. Individually, these clusters were not statistically more prevalent. What was significantly increased was the accumulation of multiple clusters within the same women. The more clusters present, the more severe the dysregulation.