Study, 2025
Does a new way of tracking hormones in research align measurements better across different women?
Yes. The new PACTS method improves how well researchers can align estrogen measurements during the first part of the menstrual cycle, though it works similarly to traditional methods for progesterone during the second part.
What they did
Created a new method called PACTS to track when hormones rise and fall during the menstrual cycle. Tested it using daily hormone measurements from 44 menstrual cycles and compared results to traditional counting methods.
What they found
PACTS better aligns estrogen measurements, especially during the early part of the cycle when hormone timing varies most between women. It works similarly to traditional methods for tracking progesterone during the later part of the cycle.
What it means for you
This new method could help future researchers study PMDD and other menstrual cycle conditions more accurately. The main limitation is it was tested on only 44 cycles from an unspecified number of women.
44
menstrual cycles studied
About the study
- Original title
- Studying the Menstrual Cycle as a Continuous Variable: Implementing Phase-Aligned Cycle Time Scaling (PACTS) with the `menstrualcycleR` package
- Authors
- Anisha Nagpal, Katja Maria Schmalenberger, Jordan Barone et al.
- Year
- 2025
- Study design
- Study
- What was tested
- PACTS method
- Read the paper
- doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/hd5xw_v1
Topics
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