Survey study, 2025
Can stress affect your menstrual cycle?
Stress can affect the menstrual cycle in various ways, from making it irregular to stopping periods completely, and can cause serious long-term health problems including bone loss and heart risks.
What they did
Discussion of how chronic stress affects menstrual cycles and ovulation through the brain's hormone system. The review covers how stress disrupts the pathway that controls menstruation, from mild effects like shorter cycle phases to severe effects like missing periods entirely.
What they found
Stress can cause a range of menstrual problems depending on severity, from regular cycles with short luteal phases to irregular cycles, skipped ovulation, and missing periods completely. Severe stress-related loss of periods causes bone loss, damage to blood vessels, and increased heart disease risk. Functional hypothalamic amenorrhea from severe stress has serious long-term health consequences.
What it means for you
Stress can seriously harm menstrual health and cause lasting medical problems. Current research doesn't fully explain how common this is, which treatments work, or how people recover. Larger and longer studies are needed to understand this condition better.
About the study
- Original title
- The silent pandemic of stress: impact on menstrual cycle and ovulation
- Authors
- Saadedine M, Berga SL, Faubion SS et al.
- Journal
- Stress (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Year
- 2025
- Study design
- Survey study
- What was tested
- None - discussion of biological mechanisms
- Open access
- Yes
- Read the paper
- doi.org/10.1080/10253890.2025.2457767
Topics
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