Irregular Periods And PCOS Can Break Your Heart, Literally
Your menstrual pattern doesn’t only impact your fertility and mental health – it’s also dropping clues about your cardiovascular wellbeing.
By Estelle Low SY -
One thing all menstruating women can agree on: periods are the cursed gift that keeps on giving. As if dealing with monthly bleeds and hormonal upheavals isn’t terrible enough, some of us get bestowed things like irregular menstrual cycles and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) – which only add up to make our lives even more difficult.
It’s not just about the pain, annoyance and anxiety. If you happen to have irregular periods or PCOS, there's a convincing reason to pay more attention to your health. New research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals a nasty connection between those hormonal imbalances and our heart and metabolic health. Life’s really not fair.
The study, featuring 60,789 participants from the Apple Women’s Health Study, found that those with PCOS had a significantly higher prevalence of cardiometabolic conditions including obesity, prediabetes, type 1 and 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension, arrhythmia, congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, heart attack and deep vein thrombosis.
Even in the absence of PCOS, those with haywire periods or who took a longer time to achieve regular menstrual cycles were linked to a higher prevalence of cardiometabolic conditions.
In Singapore, about 10% of women of reproductive age are estimated to have PCOS.
The study’s co-principal investigator Shruthi Mahalingaiah, an assistant professor of environmental, reproductive, and women’s health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, added: "The exploration into age at diagnosis revealed that individuals with PCOS or prolonged time to menstrual regularity tended to be diagnosed with cardiometabolic conditions several years earlier than their counterparts.”
TLDR, if your periods are anything but clockwork or if PCOS is part of your reality, it’s time to have a heart-to-heart with your healthcare provider. As we know, early detection and intervention is key to warding off pesky health issues down the road.
Not all’s lost, of course. Postdoctoral research fellow in the study, Zifan Wang, offers: “While future research is needed in this area, our preliminary exploration suggests that a higher BMI or lower level of physical activity may exacerbate these risks, highlighting the potential benefits of lifestyle interventions.”
Translation? Making healthy lifestyle choices, such as having balanced and nutritious diets and getting sufficient physical activity, is the best you can do to lower your risk of heart- and metabolic-related concerns.