In Vol. 011 I said there was another variable in those months. An environmental one, in the apartment I was living in. I told you I would write about it. This is that dispatch.

The mould was confirmed. When we opened the roof, you could see it — black, in patches, where the water had been getting in for longer than any of us had realised. The kind of thing that, once you have seen it, you cannot un-see. Months of symptoms I had been blaming on other things suddenly had somewhere else to live. I detoxed myself and my family from late 2025 to early 2026. I am not going to write about the specifics of that protocol here — I want to give it the dispatch it deserves on its own, when I am ready. What I do want to write about today is what mould actually does in a woman's body, why so many of us are walking around with no idea it is part of the picture, and what I felt happen in my own nervous system when I started detoxing.

One thing before I go any further. I hold a holistic view of women's health. AION is not a brand that thinks mainstream medicine has all the answers and functional medicine has none, or the other way around. The most useful conversation about mould and women's hormones happens in the space where both are read carefully — where the peer-reviewed studies and the things integrative practitioners have been seeing in their clinics for years are held next to each other honestly. That is the conversation I want to have here.

I had been blaming everything on other things. The relationship I wrote about in Vol. 011. Postpartum. Bad sleep. Two small children. And those things were all real — they would have explained a lot. But there was another layer underneath all of it, and I could not see it until I was out of the building.

Looking back now, what was happening in my body was this. I was wired in a way I had never been before. My nervous system felt switched on, constantly, like there was a smoke alarm going off in the background that no one else could hear. I was startling at noises. I was crying at things that did not warrant crying. I was forgetting words mid-sentence. I would walk into a room and forget what I had come in for, three or four times a day. My brain felt foggy in a way that was not just sleep deprivation — it was like trying to think through water.

And underneath all of it, this constant low-grade feeling of doom. The kind that sits in your chest and does not leave. The kind you start to think is just your personality now, because you have forgotten what it felt like before.

I attributed every bit of it to other things. Postpartum hormones. Grief. The stress of the relationship. Sleep deprivation. Being a mother of small children. All of it could have explained what I was feeling. None of it was the full story. The apartment was the part I was not seeing.

I want to answer this directly because it is the question most women are searching for when they end up at something like this.

The short answer is yes — but probably not in the way the internet most often describes it. The clearest, best-documented pathway between indoor mould and the symptoms that feel hormonal is through inflammation. Indoor mould makes your body inflamed. Inflammation, in midlife, makes everything harder — and a lot of what gets called "hormonal" in midlife is, underneath, an inflammatory load that has gotten heavier than your body can quietly manage.

This is established. The U.S. Institute of Medicine's Damp Indoor Spaces and Health report from 2004 — a National Academies review of all the research up to that point — concluded that there is sufficient evidence linking indoor dampness and mould to respiratory symptoms, asthma, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, and immune perturbation. In Vol. 014 we made the case that inflammation is the through-line running through everything in this arc — relational stress, cortisol-cycle disruption, the 3am wake-up, all of it. If you are living in a mould-affected home and walking into perimenopause, you are bringing a heavier inflammatory load to a window where your body is already losing some of its anti-inflammatory protection from oestrogen. Mould can absolutely make what looks like a hormonal imbalance worse. The mechanism is real — it is just one step removed from where the popular conversation usually places it.

The bigger claim — that mould directly disrupts your oestrogen, your thyroid, your cortisol — is the framing integrative practitioners have been making clinically for years. The research is starting to catch up to what they have been seeing. The clinical observations are real. The mechanism is plausible. The literature is younger than the experience.

There is real science on mycotoxins (the toxic compounds that some moulds produce) and how they interact with hormones. The best-studied one is zearalenone. It is produced by Fusarium fungi and it is shaped enough like oestrogen that it binds to oestrogen receptors in the body and produces oestrogen-like effects. Animals have been studied extensively. Humans, by reasonable inference, respond similarly (Rai et al., 2017; reviewed in Toxins, 2022).

So far so good — but there is an honest detail here that the popular conversation glosses over. Zearalenone shows up in food — contaminated grains, animal feed — not in the air of a damp building. The species of mould that grow in damp homes (Stachybotrys, Aspergillus, Penicillium) are not the same species that produce zearalenone (Fusarium). They produce different toxins. So when someone tells you the mould in your apartment was producing oestrogenic compounds and disrupting your hormones, the science behind that specific chain has not actually been built yet. It might be in the future. For now, the species and the exposure route matter, and conflating them is one of the things I want to be careful not to do here.

There is a smaller study on indoor mould exposure and thyroid function — Somppi (2017) — looking at nine women exposed to indoor air dampness microbiota who developed non-thyroidal illness syndrome. Nine women is too small to ground a whole clinical conversation on. But it is a real published case series, and it is a legitimate direction for further research.

This is the part that the integrative medicine world has been talking about for years, and that the mainstream research is only now catching up to. If you spend any time in mould-recovery communities online, you will see women describing the same thing over and over again. They say it differently — "I feel like I'm reacting to everything," "my body feels switched on all the time," "I feel like I'm losing my mind," "I feel like a stranger to myself," "I cannot turn my brain off," "my nervous system feels lit up" — but they are describing the same experience. A nervous system that has stopped feeling like theirs.

And the science is starting to confirm what they have been saying. Trichothecene mycotoxins — produced by Stachybotrys, the black mould that grows in damp homes — have been documented to cause neuroinflammation, change neurotransmitter levels, and increase irritability and emotional reactivity (Cusinato et al., Frontiers in Pharmacology, 2025; reviewed in Toxins, 2025). A 2025 study of 182 people with documented mycotoxin exposure found that their "emotional management skills were impaired" — which is the clinical-paper version of what women have been saying for years: I am not myself in this house.

The mechanism is not complicated. The mould drives inflammation in the brain. Brain inflammation activates the HPA axis (the stress system). The stress system, when it has been activated for too long, stops being able to regulate emotion the way it used to. Your body starts reading every input as a threat. You become reactive — not because something is wrong with you, but because something is happening to you that you did not sign up for and may not even know is happening.

Integrative practitioners have been describing this clinically for years. The research is now backing it up. Both have been pointing at the same thing.

I want to tell you what this felt like in my body. Not in clinical language. The way I would say it to a friend.

I was reactive in a way that did not feel like me. I would snap at things that should not have warranted a snap. I would lie awake at night with my body buzzing, like I had drunk five coffees I had not had. I felt, constantly, like I was waiting for something bad to happen — even when nothing was happening. The kids would be asleep. The apartment would be quiet. And I would be wound so tight I could not put it down.

The hardest part was that I had started to think this was just who I was now. That motherhood had changed me. That the relationship had hardened me. That maybe perimenopause was making me a different woman. I would look in the mirror and not recognise the version of myself looking back — the one who used to be patient, who used to feel things in proportion, who used to be able to let small things be small.

I felt like I was losing my mind, and I was telling no one — because what was I going to say? That my own body felt like it was working against me? That I could not be in a room without something inside me being on alert? I did not have language for what was happening. I just had the feeling.

When I started detoxing, the thing I noticed first was that the buzzing began to quiet. Not gone. Quieter. Then I noticed I had slept a full night without waking, and the next morning I had been able to make breakfast for the kids without feeling like every sound was a threat. Then I noticed I had been in a room with my children for an hour and just been there — not on alert, not braced, not waiting. Just with them. I started to cry the first time I realised that. I had not known how much I had been holding until I felt it begin to release.

The thing that came back when the mould left my body was not a new me. It was the woman I had been before — and had assumed, for the months I was living in that apartment, that I had lost. She had not gone anywhere. She had been underneath the whole time, waiting for the inflammation to come down enough that she could surface.

If any of this is sounding familiar to you — the buzzing, the reactivity, the sense that you have become someone you do not recognise — I want you to know that it might not be who you are. It might be what your body is reading. And when the reading changes, you come back.

Here is the honest read. Indoor mould drives inflammation. Inflammation in midlife is one of the most consequential variables in how perimenopause actually feels. If you have been living in a damp or water-damaged home and you are walking into perimenopause, you are carrying more than the hormonal change alone — and that combination is plausibly a much bigger part of what you are feeling than anyone has told you.

For most women, mould is not the answer. For some of us, it is — and we have rarely been asked the question. The work, if you are reading this and any of it is landing, is to ask it honestly. Have I been living somewhere damp, water-damaged, or visibly mould-affected? Have I had a flood that was not properly remediated? Is there a smell in my home that has not gone away? Could the inflammatory load of that exposure be part of what I am carrying right now?

If the answer is yes, the work is the apartment first. Remediation, or leaving. Then a clinical conversation with someone who reads both the mainstream and integrative literature seriously. If the answer is no, mould probably is not your variable, and the other dispatches in this arc — the cortisol one, the sleep one, the inflammation one — will be more useful to you.

I stand by you in this, un abrazo.
— Belinda Singkepe Holloway

LE PROTOCOLE: Turning the Research into Intelligence

Three concrete moves for the woman who recognises herself in this.

The AION Atelier Baseline is the panel built to read the cluster of markers this dispatch describes — inflammation, immune function, cortisol, and the hormonal architecture of perimenopause — against women's reference ranges, not male-default ones. It is what makes the question what has my body actually been carrying, environmentally and otherwise something you can finally answer with data. Begin here.

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We do not provide medical advice. We provide the intelligence to ask better questions.

THE SOURCES:

Institute of Medicine. (2004). Damp Indoor Spaces and Health. Committee on Damp Indoor Spaces and Health. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. DOI: 10.17226/11011.

Rai, A., Das, M., & Tripathi, A. (2017). Zearalenone as an endocrine disruptor in humans. Food and Chemical Toxicology. PMID: 27771507.

Bertero, A., et al. (2022). Biomarkers of Exposure to Zearalenone in In Vivo and In Vitro Studies. Toxins, 14(5), 291. PMC9230539.

Somppi, T. L. (2017). Non-Thyroidal Illness Syndrome in Patients Exposed to Indoor Air Dampness Microbiota. PMC5545575.

Cusinato, M., et al. (2025). Mycotoxins and neuropsychiatric symptoms: possible role in special refugee populations. Frontiers in Pharmacology.

Mosi, M., et al. (2025). Neurotoxicological Effects of Some Mycotoxins on Humans Health and Methods of Neuroprotection. Toxins, 17(1), 24.

Lei, A. A., et al. (2025). Chronic Stress-Associated Depressive Disorders: The Impact of HPA Axis Dysregulation and Neuroinflammation on the Hippocampus. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 26(7), 2940. DOI: 10.3390/ijms26072940. PMC11988747.

Metcalf, C. A., et al. (2021). Brain, Behavior, & Immunity – Health, 15, 100280. (Penn Ovarian Aging Study — for the inflammation-perimenopause pathway referenced.)