Apple has added and launched period tracking to the iOS Health app a clinical study of women’s health back in 2019. Now the Apple Women’s Health Study team has some preliminary data confirming that there is indeed an incredible variety of menstrual symptoms in menstruating people around the world.
The findings were of the first 10,000 participants who enrolled in the study using the iPhone Research app and provided demographics. Of that number, 6,141 participants registered menstrual symptoms, and the most tracked were abdominal cramps (83%), bloating (63%), and fatigue (61%). Or actually, things anyone who’s 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, lower back pain, and breast tenderness. Some of the rarer symptoms included diarrhea, sleep changes, constipation, nausea, hot flushes and ovulation pain.
A takeaway was that regardless of race, ethnicity, age, and geographic location, the frequency of symptoms was nearly universal. The participants reported cramps, bloating, and fatigue as their most common symptoms, and in comparable numbers. So, you know, hard evidence that these symptoms can affect any menstruating person.
These findings probably seem ludicrously obvious to anyone ever regularly visited by Aunt Flo. However, they also illustrate how current medical research is woefully 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 advancements in cycle tracking tools available, research on menstrual cycles and menstrual health remains limited,” said Dr. Shruthi Mahalingaiah, a lead investigator on the study and an assistant professor. at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “Historically, there has been insufficient research on the menstrual cycle and women are underrepresented in very important, large studies.”
For example, if you search for “period” in PubMed between 2001 and 2018 you will only get about 8,400 studies on this topic. Conversely, a search for cardiovascular diseases in the same period yields 1.3 million results. If you want to get gender specific conditions, prostate cancer will get 121,000 results and erectile dysfunction about 16,000 results. The problem gets worse when you consider that historically most researchers have been men and women excluded from clinical trials. In the US, Congress did not require women to be included in clinical trials until 1993The result is a massive lack of basic data and poorer medical care for women. Take polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects an estimated 5 million women in the US, making it one of the most common hormonal disorders in women of childbearing age – en less than half are correctly diagnosed and 34% with PCOS say more than was necessary two years and three or more doctors to get a diagnosis. The numbers are even worse for endometriosis, a painful condition that affects about 10% of women and cancer often takes one decade to be diagnosed. The general stigmatization of talking about menstrual cycles, vaginas, or uterus doesn’t help.
This is a problem that wearable makers are also guilty of. Fitbit trackers have been around since 2011, but it took Fitbit seven years to add cycle tracking. Garmin and Apple soon followed, and the former was also launched pregnancy last November. Apple and Ava, a fertility tracker, are the only two so far engaged in clinical research specifically around women’s health.
So while the preliminary results from the Apple Women’s Health Study aren’t exactly astonishing, it’s a good thing this study even 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 quite high. When you consider that any woman or menstruating person with an Apple Watch or iPhone could potentially participate in the study, you’re looking at a vast, diverse data set that can help solve the blatant 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 with long-term health, as well as more about what environmental factors can affect cycle duration and characteristics,” Mahalingaiah said. “With this study, we create a larger fundamental data set on this topic, which could ultimately lead to further discovery and innovation in health research and care for women.”