What you may not know about your fertility journey: from puberty to menopause.

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Hi there! And welcome back to my blog. If you haven't read my previous article 'What you may not know about your fertility Journey: from birth to puberty' which would be the part one of this blog, please click here to get a better understanding of our discussions for this article. Without much further ado, lets get right into it shall we?

At a much younger age, when the term biological clock was thrown around, I never really quite understood what it meant. I knew women were advised to include their plans of having kids -if they wanted to- before entering their mid to late 30's because of a functioning yet never seen biological clock. As the years grew by, I started to understand more that this was just a term substituted for the gradual decline in the number if eggs in the ovarian reserve as time progresses until menopause.

But what happens before menopause, your eggs don't all just die in one day, signaling the end of your fertile phase. As one approaches the age of puberty, that is before the first period -mernache- about 1,000 eggs are being released each month and prepped for about 13 months (approximately a year) and on the 13th month only one egg is released during ovulation. This circle continues each month through out the years following up until around the mid to late 30's. Now lets break this even further.

As one approaches the age of puberty, that is before the first period -mernache- about 1,000 eggs are being released each month and prepped for about 13 months (approximately a year) and on the 13 months only one egg is released during ovulation.

Lets imagine all the eggs housed in the ovarian reserve to be soldiers -stay with me- and each month a thousand of them were recruited for intense training so that at the end of the year, one emerges as the champion while the rest are discarded, - sounds brutal right?-. Now this continues every month subsequently having a new batch of 1,000 each month to produce a single champion at the end of the year. In the case of ovulation, each ovary produces an egg on alternate months but in some cases (eg fratanal twins) one egg is produced from each ovary at the same time. This means that the matured egg that would be released during your next ovulation started its journey approximately a year ago.

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With this being understood, we can now have an understanding on the events leading up to menopause. If each month about a thousand eggs are reabsorbed (die), that means each year we have about 12,000 eggs that do not reach maturity and eventually die. Now lets calculate the probable amount of eggs lost between the ages of 13 to 37.

The number of years between the listed ages is 24 years, giving us 288 months in total. If about a thousand eggs are lost each month, that means about 288, 000 eggs are gone from the ovarian reserve at the age of 37. If we round it up to about 300,000 and subtract it from the original 400,000 we see that at age 37, we have approximately 100,000 eggs left in the reserve.

Although this may look like a lot, at age 37 the pace at which the eggs die increases and the probability of producing a matured or viable egg each month reduces.

So lets give a brief recap on what was written so far;

• There is a gradual decline in the number of eggs in the ovarian reserve as time progresses until menopause.

• About 1,000 eggs are released and prepped for about 13 months (approximately a year) and on the 13th month only one egg is released during ovulation.

• Each ovary alternates the release of a matured egg every month, except in a few cases.

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