Apple added period tracking to the iOS Health app and launched it a clinical study on women’s health in 2019. Now, the Apple Women’s Health Study team has some preliminary data that states that, yes, there is an incredible variety of period symptoms that menstruating people around the world suffer from.
The results were from the first 10,000 participants who enrolled in the study using the iPhone Research app and provided demographic data. Of this figure, 6,141 participants recorded symptoms of the period and the most followed were abdominal cramps (83%), swelling (63%) and fatigue (61%). Or basically things that anyone who has had a period could tell doctors if they just asked. About half of the participants also reported acne, headaches, mood swings, changes in appetite, back pain, and breast tenderness. Some rarer symptoms included diarrhea, changes in sleep, constipation, nausea, hot flashes, and ovulation pain.
One of the takeaways was that, regardless of race, ethnicity, age, and geographic location, the frequency of symptoms was almost universal. Participants reported cramps, swelling, and fatigue as the most common symptoms and in a similar number. So, you know, clear evidence that these symptoms can affect anyone menstruating.
These discoveries probably seem ridiculously obvious to everyone that Aunt Flo visits regularly. However, they also illustrate how current medical research is tremendously inadequate in terms of women’s health.
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“One of the most important things to keep in mind is that despite some of the advances in cycle tracking tools available, research into menstrual cycles and menstrual health remains limited,” said Dr. Shruthi Mahalingaiah, lead researcher on the study. . assistant professor at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “Historically, the menstrual cycle has been little researched and women have been underrepresented in important and important studies.”
For example, if you search for “menstruation” in PubMed between 2001 and 2018, you will only get about 8,400 studies on the subject. In contrast, a search during this same time period for cardiovascular disease produces 1.3 million results. If you want to get into gender-specific conditions, prostate cancer gets 121,000 results and erectile dysfunction gets about 16,000 results. The problem is made worse if we consider that most researchers, historically speaking, have been men and have excluded women from clinical research. In the United States, Congress did not require women to be included in clinical trials until 1993. The result is a great lack of fundamental data and poorer medical care for women. Take polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects an estimated 5 million women in the United States, making it one of the most common hormonal disorders among women of childbearing age and less than half are diagnosed correctly and 34% with PCOS say it has taken longer than two years and three or more doctors to receive a diagnosis. The numbers are even worse for endometriosis, a painful condition that affects about 10% of women and often takes one decade to be diagnosed. Not helping things is the general stigma of talking about menstrual cycles, vaginas or uteri.
This is a problem that manufacturers of garment products are also to blame. Fitness trackers have been around since 2011, but it took Fitbit seven years to add cycle tracking. Garmin and Apple soon followed, with the former also launched pregnancy monitoring last November. However, Apple and Ava, a fertility tracker, are the only two who have so far been dedicated to clinical research specifically on women’s health.
So while the preliminary results from Apple’s women’s health study aren’t exactly mind-blowing, it’s good that it even exists. The potential of portable computers, 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 menstruating with an Apple Watch or an iPhone could potentially participate in the study, you’re looking at a massive and diverse data set that can help address the huge lack of fundamental data on women’s health. .
“What researchers and doctors in the scientific community want and need to know is more about the menstrual cycle, its relationship to long-term health, as well as more about what environmental factors can affect the 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 women’s health research and care.”