Apple added period tracking to the iOS Health app and released 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 menstrual symptoms suffered by menstruating people around the world.
The results were of the first 10,000 participants who enrolled in the study using the iPhone Research app and provided demographic data. Of that number, 6,141 participants reported menstrual symptoms and the most commonly monitored were abdominal cramps (83%), bloating (63%) and tiredness (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, low back pain and breast tenderness. Some more rare symptoms include diarrhea, sleep disorders, constipation, nausea, hot flashes and ovulation pain.
One lesson was that, regardless of race, ethnicity, age and geographic location, the frequency of symptoms was almost universal. Participants reported cramping, swelling and tiredness as the most frequent symptoms and in similar numbers. So, you know, concrete evidence that these symptoms can affect any menstruating person.
These findings probably seem ridiculously obvious to anyone who is regularly visited by Aunt Flo. However, they also illustrate how current medical research is woefully inadequate with regard to women’s health.
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“One of the most important things to note is that despite some of the advances in cycle tracking tools available, research on menstrual cycles and menstrual health remains limited,” said Dr. Shruthi Mahalingaiah, the study’s lead researcher and professor. assistant at Harvard School of Public Health TH Chan. “Historically, the menstrual cycle has been little researched and women have been underrepresented in large, very important studies.
For example, if you search for “menstruation” in PubMed between 2001 and 2018, you receive only 8,400 studies on the subject. On the other hand, a survey during that same period of cardiovascular diseases shows 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 aggravated when you consider that most researchers, historically speaking, were men and excluded women from clinical research. In the USA, Congress did not require women to be included in clinical trials until 1993. The result is a huge lack of basic data and poor medical care for women. See polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects about 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 took 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 a decade to be diagnosed. What does not help is the general stigmatization of talking about menstrual cycles, vaginas or uteri.
This is a problem that wearable manufacturers are also guilty of. Fitness trackers have been around since 2011, but Fitbit took seven full years to add bicycle tracking. Garmin and Apple soon followed, with the first also launching pregnancy tracking last november. However, Apple and Ava, a fertility tracker, are the only ones who have so far been involved in clinical research specifically on women’s health.
So while the preliminary results of the Apple Women’s Health Study are not exactly mind-boggling, it is a good thing that this study exists. The potential for wearables, which can capture long-term data in a non-invasive way, to discover new information or lead to more research on women’s health is very high. When you consider that any woman or menstruating woman with an Apple Watch or iPhone could potentially participate in the study, you are looking at a huge and diverse set of data that can begin to help fix the glaring lack of fundamental data about women’s health.
“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 more about what environmental factors can affect the duration and characteristics of the cycle,” said Mahalingaiah. “With this study, we are creating a larger set of basic data on this topic, which could eventually lead to new discoveries and innovations in research and care for women’s health.”