Why Nearly 1 in 5 Women Experiencing Perimenopause Have Wanted to Leave Their Jobs With Bruce Dorr, MD, URPS, IFM-CP

Perimenopause remains one of the most misunderstood and underdiagnosed transitions in women's healthcare, as endocrinologist Bruce Dorr, MD, URPS, IFM-CP, will attest. Dorr spoke with Patient Care^© recently about findindgs from the recent 2025 Perimenopause Focus survey, commissioned by Biote, which revealed that nearly 40% of perimenopausal women have been misdiagnosed when seeking care for their symptoms. They report that clinicians most often will treat them for mental health conditions without addressing the underlying hormonal changes.

The survey of over 1,000 women ages 30 to 60 revealed that one-third received diagnoses and treatment for anxiety, 27% for depression, and 25% for mood swings, which is understandable as many of these symptoms overlap with hormonal imbalance. However, only about one-third (37%) of women reported having proactive conversations about perimenopause with their healthcare provider, and nearly two-thirds failed to receive adequate medical guidance during this transition. The fact that symptoms overlap with mental health conditions means more work needs to be done at the office-visit level to tease out what may require a completely different clinical approach. Dorr refers to an earlier survey in the same vein that found up to 17% of women wanted to quit their jobs because the symptoms of perimenopause were so severe. It takes time to complete a comprehensive differential diagnosis, but as Dorr emphasizes in this segment of a longer interview, women are vital in the workforce and should not need to be sidelined because of this climacteric.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for flow.

Patient Care: Could you give a brief overview of the perimenopause focus survey? And did anything specifically prompt the deployment of the survey right now?

Bruce Dorr, MD, UPRS, IFM-CP: Tere is a big buzz going on right now in the hormone space. We have a very friendly hormone person heading the FDA, Dr. Makary, and now you'll see the black box warnings coming off of all menopausal hormone therapy products, which had scared not only patients, but practitioners. And so all education had stopped in this space...We did a survey about 3 years ago looking at women in menopause. And the thing that really struck us about that survey, which included 1,000 women ages 30 to 60 and was a series of questions about how they're feeling, about their [menstrual] cycles, what's going on with their relationships, what's going on with their jobs and careers, was that up to 17% of women wanted to quit their job because their [perimenopause] symptoms were so bad. Women are vital in the workplace. Women are vital in the health space. I look at women running the whole healthcare industry. They drive their kids to the doctor. They drive their husbands to the doctor. These are very vital people in the workspace, and so symptoms as they [approach] menopause are also very important and unfortunately confused with many other things that can be going on in their jobs, in their careers, in their relationships at the same time. So to kind of tease out what is going on for these women who may end up having problems in their relationships or having problems with their jobs or careers is vital to [the continuity] of these structures or entities.