Sadly, ‘the right time’ may not be something you are in control of and currently early menopause affects one in 20 UK women which of course reduces the number of available fertile years.  Lead scientist Dr Anna Murray, from the University of Exeter Peninsula Medical School, says, “It is estimated that a woman’s ability to conceive decreases on average ten years before she starts the menopause. Therefore, those who are destined to have an early menopause and delay childbearing until their 30s are more likely to have problems conceiving.”

The study Breakthrough Generations Study was done by scientists at the University of Exeter Peninsula Medical School and The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and funded by The Wellcome Trust.  They tested four genes associated with the menopause and then compared 2,000 women from the Breakthrough Generations Study who had experienced early menopause with a matched group of the same number. The four genes each affected risk of early menopause individually, but in combination they had a larger impact, which goes some way towards explaining why some women experience early menopause.

The Breakthrough Generations Study is a large and comprehensive study into the causes of breast cancer and will follow the 100,000 UK women participants for the next 40 years to unravel the lifestyle, environmental and genetic factors that cause the disease.

Although early menopause is associated with a decreased risk of breast cancer, women who experience early menopause are susceptible to other health problems including osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease and a reduction in fertility.

It is hoped that the research could help women determine whether they have a genetic predisposition to early menopause, and therefore predict the time of the end of their reproductive life so they could then make informed family planning decisions on the basis of this knowledge.  These findings are the first stage in developing an easy and relatively inexpensive genetic test which could help the one in 20 UK women who may be affected by early menopause.

So what caused that drop of 50 per cent in taking HRT? It seems this is what John Lee described as women ‘voting with their bodies’ rather than the medical profession prescribing less.

A study undertaken in 2009 at Stanford University in California found that women who take HRT for more than five years double their risk of suffering breast cancer for every 12 months they spend taking it. Breast cancer is the most common form of the disease diagnosed in women in Britain and one in nine women will develop the disease at some form in their life. More than 45,000 cases are diagnosed every year and about 15,000 women die from the cancer, although survival rates have increased significantly in recent years.

However, the good news is that within a year of stopping HRT the risk of developing breast cancer was almost back to normal. This was not a small scale study either, unlike the original research on HRT, as more than 57,0000 women were studied which enabled the research team to say conclusively that there was very strong evidence that HRT causes breast cancer.

A Danish study showed that the average age of breast development in young girls has gone down by a full year since 1990. This was a 15 year study and found that whereas in the early 90s, the average age was 10.88, at present it is occurring around 9.86 years of age. 


Doctors often put this down to childhood obesity, and certainly diet plays a significant role because of what they are eating. A diet containing plenty of non-organic meat and dairy products can certainly give a young girl a dose of hormones and growth promoters that are present in those foods that she doesn’t need.

Young girls hormones are impacted by food and additional hormones coming in from what seems like a healthy option like soy milk. Unfortunately though soy milk can be a useful addition to a mature woman’s diet, the levels of phytoestrogen that are present in it are not helpful to young girls.

Development of the breast that occurs at puberty is dependent on oestrogen, but that needs to come from the girls own body. Putting in additional dietary sources can seriously affect her hormone balance.

Early puberty brings with it additional problems, the most serious of which is the high incidence of breast cancer associated with the early onset of physical maturity. We know that oestrogen is implicated in breast cancer, so it makes sense to not to provide a diet that would artificially increase the amounts of this hormone in the body.