Most women who have a hysterectomy before the age of natural menopause and retain their ovaries are reassured that there is no impact on their ovarian function and that they’ll go through menopause at the average age of around 51. The implication is clear: no uterus, no more periods or pregnancy risk, but hormonally, nothing changes. You keep your ovaries, you keep normal estrogen production, and you keep your timeline to menopause.
Perhaps it’s buried in the consent forms or simply glossed over in preop counseling, but few women are told that the preponderance of data suggests removing the uterus alone accelerates ovarian aging, putting women at risk for an early or premature menopause and the downstream collateral damages of estrogen loss.
More than half of all hysterectomies are performed on women younger than age 44, with the highest rates among women aged 40 to 44. That makes this an important clinical concern: early or…
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