If you’re a woman approaching middle age and you’re on social media, you might have been urged to get your hormones checked.

These posts often highlight troubling symptoms of perimenopause. Then they flag blood tests as a way to help you understand what’s going on and to guide treatment.

Some women are now turning to wellness providers and online services seeking these types of tests, often at substantial expense.

But these tests don’t provide any benefits. An editorial in the British medical journal BMJ has raised an alert about these tests. The authors conclude they’re unnecessary and shouldn’t guide treatment decisions.

So what hormonal changes occur in the transition to menopause? And why is hormonal testing mostly unhelpful?

The key hormones the ovaries produce before menopause are oestrogens (mostly as oestradiol, but also as oestrone) together with progesterone and testosterone.

The amount of each hormone produced changes during the menstrual cycle.

Blood oestradiol levels double around the time of ovulation. This is followed by an increase in progesterone.

Testosterone blood levels also increase around ovulation, but the increase is less than about 10%.

Menopause happens when the ovaries have lost the capacity to produce an egg. After menopause, oestrogen and progesterone blood levels are dramatically lower than before menopause.

Perimenopause is the time between being pre-menopausal, through to the first........

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