How the symptom checker works
Most women in perimenopause spend months -- sometimes years -- not knowing what is happening to them. The symptoms overlap with burnout, thyroid conditions, and everyday stress. Doctors have 10 minutes. SUMM gives you a way to organise what you are experiencing before you walk into that appointment.
What the checker looks at
The SUMM symptom checker assesses your answers across four patterns. These patterns reflect the most common explanations for the symptoms professional women in midlife bring to their clinicians.
Hormonal
Fluctuating oestrogen and progesterone affect sleep, mood, cognition, and temperature regulation. The pattern includes vasomotor symptoms like hot flushes and night sweats alongside psychological and cognitive changes.
Thyroid
Thyroid dysfunction -- particularly an underactive thyroid -- produces symptoms that are almost identical to perimenopause. Feeling cold, sluggish cognition, hair changes, and fatigue that does not improve with rest are key differentiators.
Stress and burnout
Chronic work stress and burnout produce overlapping symptoms -- particularly fatigue, brain fog, and sleep disruption. The key clinical difference: burnout symptoms improve meaningfully with rest and time away from work. Hormonal symptoms do not.
Nutritional
Iron deficiency, low vitamin D, and B12 insufficiency produce fatigue, brain fog, and mood changes that are clinically indistinguishable from early perimenopause. These are worth ruling out first -- they are simple to test and straightforward to address.
How your result is calculated
Your answers are assessed against clinical criteria drawn from four published frameworks:
Each question is weighted based on how strongly that symptom points toward one pattern versus another. Some symptoms are highly specific -- cold intolerance points strongly toward thyroid, hot flushes point strongly toward perimenopause. Others are shared across patterns and carry less individual weight.
Your result reflects the pattern your answers most closely resemble -- not a diagnosis. It is designed to help you and your clinician start from a more informed position.
What the tracker measures
Sleep
Sleep disruption is the most commonly reported perimenopause symptom. We ask one question daily: how did you sleep last night, rated 1 to 5. Over 14 days this shows whether your disruption is consistent, cyclical, or improving.
Energy
Fatigue in perimenopause is distinct from normal tiredness -- it does not resolve with rest. We track this separately from mood because it affects work capacity directly.
Cognitive clarity
Cognitive symptoms affect 40-60% of perimenopausal women. No consumer tracker currently measures this as a daily metric. We do -- because for professional women, clarity is the symptom that most directly affects career performance.
The SUMM Score
Your three daily ratings are combined into a single number: the SUMM Score. A rising score means things are improving. A falling score means your current approach is not working. The score is intentionally simple so you and your clinician can interpret it without any statistical training.
The SUMM Score has not yet been independently validated in a clinical study. That is the next step. If you are a researcher or clinician interested in collaborating, we would like to hear from you.
Get in touchWhy work impact matters
Every day the tracker asks one additional question: did your symptoms affect your ability to work today? This produces a work-impact frequency that does not exist in any other consumer health tracker. Over 14 days it shows exactly how often symptoms are interfering with your professional life -- for you and for your clinician.
14 million
working days lost to perimenopause annually in the UK
Fawcett Society, 2022
References
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Harlow SD et al. Executive summary of the Stages of Reproductive Aging Workshop +10. Menopause. 2012;19(4):387-395.
Fawcett Society. Menopause and the Workplace. 2022.
Abbasi B et al. The effect of magnesium supplementation on primary insomnia in elderly: a double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial. Journal of Research in Medical Sciences. 2012;17(12):1161-1169.
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Thurston RC et al. Psychosocial factors and hot flashes. Menopause. 2008;15(5):841-847.
NICE NG23 Menopause: identification and management. 2024.