Jerilynn C. Prior is a Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She has spent her career studying menstrual cycles and the effects of the cycle’s changing oestrogen and progesterone hormone levels on women’s health. She is the founder and Scientific Director of the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research (CeMCOR).
Dr. Prior has studied women’s menstrual cycles, perimenopause, menopause and the causes for and treatment of osteoporosis. She has shown that regular cycles (with enough oestrogen) commonly do not produce sufficient progesterone (anovulation or short luteal phases). She first discovered and has since proven by meta-analysis that more versus fewer ovulatory disturbances within regular cycles are related to significant spinal bone loss in healthy women ages 20-45.
Dr. Prior is internationally known for her cumulative studies that now support progesterone as causing women’s increased bone formation through progesterone-specific osteoblast receptors. She has documented that oestrogen levels, besides being unpredictable, are significantly higher than normal in perimenopause, the 3-10 years of changes before menopause.
She is widely sought as a speaker for professional and lay audiences and is the author of the award-winning book Oestrogen’s Storm Season: Stories of Perimenopause, a fiction book designed to inform and empower perimenopausal women. Dr. Prior along with Susan Baxter PhD, sociologist/medical journalist, is author of The Oestrogen Errors – Why Progesterone Is Better for Women’s Health (2009). This book aims to inform women of the decades of presumption and prejudice behind estrogen-centric women’s health dogma. She has authored scientific papers numbering over 270 and holds 6 patents.
She is an Honourary Alumna of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine and was awarded its Distinguished Medical Research Lecturer Award (2002). She has numerous other honours including the Ann Voda Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 from the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research and the Knowledge Translation in Women’s Health Research Award from the BC Women’s Health Research Institute in 2017.
