Apple added period tracking to the iOS Health app and launched a clinical study on women’s health back in 2019. Now the Apple Women’s Health Study team has some preliminary data confirming that yes, there is an incredible variety of menstrual symptoms suffered by menstruating people worldwide.
The findings were from the first 10,000 participants who enrolled for the study using the iPhone Research app and provided demographic data. Of the number, 6,141 participants reported periodic symptoms and the most detected were abdominal cramps (83%), bloating (63%) and fatigue (61%). Or, basically, things that everyone who has ever had a period can tell doctors if they just ask. About half of the participants also reported acne, headaches, moodiness, appetite changes, back pain, and breast tenderness. Some rarer symptoms include diarrhea, sleep changes, constipation, nausea, hot flashes and ovulation pain.
One takeaway was that regardless of race, ethnicity, age, and geographic location, the symptom frequency was almost universal. The participants report cramps, bloating and fatigue as their most common symptoms, and in similar numbers. So, you know, hard evidence that these symptoms can affect any menstruating person.
These findings probably seem ridiculously obvious to anyone who visits Aunt Flo regularly. However, it also illustrates how current medical research is unfortunately inadequate in terms of women’s health.
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“One of the most important things to note is that despite the advances available in cycle tracking instruments, research on menstrual cycles and menstrual health is limited,” said Dr. Shruthi Mahalingaiah, a lead researcher on the study and an assistant professor at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “Historically, the menstrual cycle has been under-examined, and women are under-represented in very important, large-scale studies.”
For example, if you search for ‘menstruation’ in PubMed between 2001 and 2018 you will find only 8,400 studies on the subject. Conversely, a search for cardiovascular disease during the same period yielded 1.3 million results. If you want sex-specific conditions, prostate cancer gets 121,000 results and erectile dysfunction gets about 16,000 results. The problem gets worse when you consider that most researchers, historically, were men and excluded women from clinical research. In the US, Congress did not require women to be admitted to clinical trials until 1993. The result is a huge lack of basic data and poorer medical care for women. Take polycystic ovary syndrome, which has an impact an estimated 5 million women in the US, making it one of the most common hormonal disorders among women of childbearing age – and less than half was correctly diagnosed and 34% with PCOS say that it is 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 about 10% of women and often take a decade to be diagnosed. The general stigmatization of talking about menstrual cycles, vaginas or uterus, does not help at all.
This is a problem that manufacturers of carriers are also to blame. Fitness trackers have been around since 2011, but Fitbit took a full seven years before adding cycle tracking. Garmin and Apple soon followed, with the former also launched pregnancy tracking last November. Apple en Ava, a fertility tracker, are the only two who have done clinical research so far, specifically on women’s health.
While the preliminary results for the Apple Women’s Health Study are not exactly surprising, it’s good that this study even exists. The potential for portable, 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. If you believe that any woman or menstruation with an Apple Watch or iPhone could possibly participate in the study, look at a massive, diverse data set that can help address the serious lack of fundamental data in women’s health loose.
“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 influence cycle length and characteristics,” Mahalingaiah said. “With this study, we are creating a larger fundamental dataset on this topic, which could eventually lead to further discovery and innovation in research and care for women’s health.”