Apple study confirms women have period cramps

Apple added period tracking to the iOS Health app and launched a clinical study on women’s health in 2019. Now, the Apple Women’s Health Study team has preliminary data that affirms that, yes, there is an incredible variety of menstrual symptoms in menstruating people around the world.

The results were from the first 10,000 participants who signed up for the study using the iPhone Research app and provided demographic data. Of these, 6,141 participants recorded menstrual symptoms and the most frequently followed were abdominal cramps (83%), bloating (63%) and fatigue (61%). Or, basically, things anyone who’s ever had their period could tell doctors if they just asked. About half of the participants also reported acne, headaches, mood swings, changes in appetite, lower back pain, and breast tenderness. Some more rare symptoms included diarrhea, sleep changes, constipation, nausea, hot flashes, and ovulation pain.

One of the things to remember is that, regardless of race, ethnicity, age, and geographic location, the frequency of symptoms was almost universal. Participants reported cramping, bloating, and fatigue as their most common symptoms, and in similar numbers. So, you know, hard evidence that these symptoms can affect anyone who gets their period.

These findings probably seem ridiculously obvious to anyone who regularly receives a visit from Aunt Flo. However, they also illustrate how woefully inadequate current medical research is when it comes to women’s health.

“One of the most important things to note is that despite some advancements in available cycle tracking tools, research on menstrual cycles and menstrual health remains limited,” said Dr. Shruthi Mahalingaiah, researcher principal of the study and an assistant professor at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “Historically, the menstrual cycle has been under-studied and women have been under-represented in very large and large studies.”

For example, if you search for “menstruation” in PubMed between 2001 and 2018, you only get 8,400 studies on the subject. Conversely, a search during this same period for cardiovascular disease yields 1.3 million results. If you want to get into gender-specific conditions, prostate cancer has 121,000 results and erectile dysfunction has about 16,000 results. The problem becomes worse when you consider that most researchers, historically speaking, were men and excluded women from clinical research. In the United States, Congress did not require that women be included in clinical trials until 1993. The result is a huge lack of basic data and poorer medical care for women. Take polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects about 5 million women in the United States, making it one of the most common hormonal disorders in women of childbearing age – and less than half are diagnosed correctly and 34% with PCOS say it took more than two years and three or more doctors to receive a diagnosis. The numbers are even worse for endometriosis, a painful condition that affects around 10% of women and often takes a decade to diagnose. The general stigma of talking about menstrual cycles, vagina or uterus doesn’t help at all.

This is a problem that manufacturers of wearable devices are also guilty of. Fitness trackers have been around since 2011, but it took Fitbit seven years to add cycle tracking. Garmin and Apple quickly followed suit, with the former also launching pregnancy monitoring last november. However, Apple and Ava, a fertility monitoring tool, are the only two that have so far engaged in clinical research specifically around women’s health.

So while the preliminary results from Apple’s Women’s Health Study aren’t exactly stunning, it’s a good thing this study even exists. The potential of wearable devices, which can capture long-term data non-invasively, to discover new information or lead to more research on women’s health is quite high. When you consider that any woman or person who is menstruating with an Apple Watch or iPhone could potentially participate in the study, you are looking at a massive and diverse data set that can begin to help correct the glaring lack of fundamental health data. women.

“What researchers and physicians in the scientific community want and need to know is more about the menstrual cycle, its relationship to long-term health, as well as environmental factors that may affect length and characteristics. of the cycle, ”said Mahalingaiah. “With this study, we are creating a larger set of fundamental data on this topic, which may eventually lead to new discoveries and innovations in research and women’s health care.