What can cause absence of ovulation?

There are lots of different cause that can cause absence of ovulation down to temporary absence such as if you’re particularly stressed – it might stop people ovulating for a little while, if you’ve been ill, if you’re traveling – those are types of things that just temporarily might delay ovulation or mean that you miss an ovulation in a cycle. Generally they would delay ovulation a little bit and you would go on to ovulate later.
What can actually cause an absence of ovulation?
More medically is that you have an ovulatory disorder and one very common ovulatory disorder is Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome where women will struggle to ovulate and that’s due to increase in levels of hormones but also lots of cysts on the ovaries that prevent you from maturing a follicle to ovulate each month.

Infrequent or absent ovulation can be the result of ovulatory dysfunction as we have in a case of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome or hypogonadotropic hypogonadism where the hormonal release in the female body is not frequent and systematic so as to cause the release of the egg each cycle.
Other conditions that could cause failed ovulation are thyroid dysfunction or high levels of prolactin – both hormones existing in our bodies.
There are some medications that can also cause problems with ovulation. These categories are the antidepressant medications, some epilepsy drugs, some non-steroid medications like ibuprofen or diclofenac.
Chronic disease like diabetes and also extremes of body mass index – that is when we have very high or very low body weight.

Weight loss often by itself can reverse ladies who have problems with oligomenorrhoea. So I’ve seen many ladies over the years who have erratic cycles, who have perhaps have a starting BMI of 32 or 33 over a period of maybe six months, if they lose a significant amount of weight and their BMI comes into the normal range under 30, that will often see the return of regular cycles and with that the return of spontaneous regular ovulation in which case, if the only issue was ovulation, they will often very quickly get pregnant.I think, again, rather than rushing forward into over-investigating and overanalysing things, particularly in a younger lady, make that the focus, make that the focus of lifestyle.

Sometimes there has not been enough stimulation from follicle stimulating hormone to recruit the follicles or primordial cells to become an ovum so maybe in that particular cycle none of the recruited cells made it into an ovum so no ovum was produced. It’s known that one cycle the right ovary ovulates, the next cycle the left ovary ovulates sometimes is the right and then the right and then the left and the left or sometimes none of them and sometimes it could be two at the same time: the right to the left so that’s when you have twins etc.
It’s a natural process so it could be that one cycle is just an ovulatory because of this recruiting process but of course it can also be that the ovarian reserve, for example, is low so with age after releasing and reducing these cells then they run out and then maybe there are no more cells left so that could also be a cause for an ovulatory cycles but that comes with age and it’s pretty natural as well.

he most common cause is a problem with ovulation. So we’ll say around 30% of women have difficulty ovulating every month. We call it inconsistent ovulation.  ovulation can be delayed or difficult because of many causes. The most common cause in young girls is a condition we call polycystic ovarian syndrome. And this is an imbalance in the hormones due to a condition we call insulin resistance, and that will lead to irregular ovulation occasionally some facial hair. The other possible causes are drugs if you use any or have any medical condition, and occasionally a very rare condition which we call ovarian insufficiency, in which the ovary will become really unable to produce the hormones and ovulate from an early age.