Apple has added period tracking to the iOS Health app and launched a clinical study on women’s health in 2019. Now, the Apple Health Health Study team has some preliminary data that states that, yes, there is an incredible variety of menstrual symptoms suffered by people who are menstruating worldwide.
The findings were the first 10,000 participants to enroll in the study using the iPhone Research application and provided demographic data. Of this number, 6,141 participants recorded symptoms of the period, and the most frequently followed were abdominal cramps (83%), bloating (63%) and fatigue (61%). Or, practically, things that anyone who has ever 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 rarer symptoms included diarrhea, changes in sleep, constipation, nausea, hot flashes, and ovulation pain.
One solution was that regardless of race, ethnicity, age, and geographic location, the frequency of symptoms was almost universal. Participants reported cramps, bloating, and fatigue as the most common symptoms and in similar numbers. So, you know, clear evidence that these symptoms can affect anyone who is menstruating.
These findings probably seem ridiculously obvious to anyone who is ever regularly visited by Aunt Flo. However, they also illustrate how current medical research is extremely inadequate when it comes to women’s health.
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“One of the most important things to note is that despite some of the advances available in cycle tracking tools, menstrual cycle and menstrual health research remains limited,” said Dr. Shruthi Mahalingaiah, a lead investigator of the study and a professor. assistant at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “Historically, the menstrual cycle has been under-researched, and women have been underrepresented in very important and large-scale studies.”
For example, if you are looking for “menstruation” in PubMed between 2001 and 2018, you get only 8,400 studies on this topic. In contrast, a search for cardiovascular disease in the same period of time generates 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 exacerbated when you consider that most researchers, historically speaking, have been men and have excluded women from clinical research. In the United States, Congress has not called for women to be included in clinical trials until 1993. The result is a huge lack of basic data and poorer health care for women. Take polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects about 5 million women in the US, making it one of the most common hormonal disorders among women of childbearing age – and less than half are correctly diagnosed and 34% with PCOS say it lasted 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 ia often o 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 wearables are guilty of. Fitness tracking features have been around since 2011, but Fitbit took seven years to add cycle tracking. Garmin and Apple soon followed, launching the first pregnancy tracking last November. However, Apple and Ava, a tool for monitoring fertility, are the only two that have so far engaged in clinical research, especially in terms of women’s health.
So while the preliminary results of Apple’s study of women’s health aren’t exactly amazing, it’s a good thing that this study does exist. The potential of laptops, which can capture long-term data in a non-invasive way, to discover new information or to lead to more research into women’s health is quite high. When you think that any woman or person with menstruation with Apple Watch or iPhone could participate in the study, you look at a massive and diverse data set that can begin to solve the huge lack of fundamental data in 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, and more about environmental factors that could affect the duration and characteristics of the cycle,” said Mahalingaiah. “With this study, we are creating a larger set of fundamental data on this topic, which can eventually lead to further discoveries and innovations in women’s health research and care.”