• RBWells@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    How does that work, when we are born with more than a million eggs? It’s not like you run out and that causes menopause.

    • taiyang@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Actually, kinda yes. Men continuously produce sperm but women have a finite supply of eggs. When it runs out, overies stop producing estrogen. Some older women will use HRT to fight some of the effects of menopause, though.

      • Squirrelsdrivemenuts@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        To add to that, although women have millions of eggs to start with, most of these don’t mature and you even lose about a quarter before your first period. The idea is that women with dizygotic twins have increased maturation, causing a higher incidence of releasing two eggs simultaneous and that also leads to faster decreases in eggs. At menopause most women have no eggs left in the ovaries.

        • RBWells@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          Huh. That’s interesting. My personal experience of fertility was that pregnancy happened as fast in my late 30s as it had in my 20s, so I thought they just came out 1 or 2 each month and the rest sort of just stopped developing when you went through menopause (both menarche and menopause were kind of late for me, though). I do use HRT (MHT is what they call it) but certainly not to get fertility oh heck no. It keeps away migraines and helped my thinking as well as bone mass.