Study reveals ‘strong genetic connection’ between period pain and depression

Up to 90 per cent of people who menstruate experience pain during their periods. For some, that pain is severe and linked with symptoms of depression.

Up to 90 per cent of people who menstruate experience pain during their periods. For some, that pain is severe and linked with symptoms of depression, which are often thought to be a result of the intense throbbing or cramps.

But a new a new study published Wednesday in the journal Briefings in Bioinformatics suggests it may be depression causing period pain, due to specific genes the authors identified — while other researchers said the interplay of internal mechanisms is more complicated than that.

"Depression and menstrual pain significantly impact women’s lives across the world, yet their connection remains poorly understood," lead author Dr. John Moraros, dean and professor at the School of Science at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China, said via email. "Our collective goal is to critically investigate these issues and improve care for women by uncovering these complex connections and finding better ways to address them."

Menstrual pain is known as dysmenorrhea, which occurs in the pelvis or abdomen for typically up to three days once the bleeding starts. Previous studies have shown a correlation between dysmenorrhea and depression but didn’t establish a causal relationship at the genetic level, Moraros said.

"We used a clever approach called Mendelian randomization," he said. "This method works like nature’s experiment. It uses genetic data … to see if having certain genes linked to depression also makes people more likely to have menstrual pain. This helps us understand cause-and-effect without the need to test it directly on people."

The authors collected the genetic data of around 600,000 people from European populations and 8,000 from East Asian populations from various sources, including the U.K. Biobank study, the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and FinnGen, a large-scale research project in genomics and personalized medicine.

"Next, we used bioinformatics," Moraros said. "It helps us find patterns in the genes and biological pathways that connect depression and menstrual pain."