Study is first to show that air pollutants increase risk of painful periods for women
2021-07-06
(Press-News.org) Dysmenorrhea, that is, frequent severe and painful cramps during menstruation from abnormal contractions of the uterus, is the most common of all gynecological disorders. It affects between 16-91% of girls and women of reproductive age, of whom 2%-29% have symptoms severe enough to restrict their daily activity. Now, for the first time, researchers from China Medical University Hospital in Taiwan have shown that long-term exposure to air pollutants such as nitrogen and carbon oxides and fine particulate matter greatly raises the risk of developing dysmenorrhea. Based on long-term data on air quality and public health from national databases, they show that the risk to develop dysmenorrhea over a period of 13 years (2000-2013) was up to 33 times higher among Taiwanese women and girls who lived in areas with the highest levels of air pollutants compared to their peers exposed to lower levels of pollutants. These results were recently published in the open access journal Frontiers in Public Health.
A common debilitating disorder with no known cure
Dysmenorrhea can be due to hormonal imbalances or to underlying gynecological conditions such as endometriosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, or tumors in the pelvic cavity. Symptoms are often life-long: they include cramps and pain in the lower abdomen, pain in the lower back and legs, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, fainting, weakness, fatigue, and headaches. In addition to reducing quality of life, dysmenorrhea also has a major socioeconomic impact, as females with dysmenorrhea may be temporarily unable to work, attend school, or engage in leisure activities. Dysmenorrhea has no known cure, but its symptoms may be managed with anti-inflammatory drugs and hormonal contraceptives.
"Research has already shown that women who smoke or drink alcohol during their periods, or who are overweight, or have their first period very young, run a greater risk of dysmenorrhea. Women who have never been pregnant are likewise known to be at greater risk. But here we demonstrate for the first time another important risk factor for developing dysmenorrhea: air quality, in particular long-term exposure to pollution. We don't yet know the underlying mechanism, but emotional stress in women exposed to air pollutants, or higher average levels of the hormone-like prostaglandins in their body, might be part of the answer," says one of the authors, Prof Chung Y. Hsu at the College of Medicine, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan.
The authors, led by Prof Chia-Hung Kao, the Director of the department of nuclear medicine and the Center for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) at China Medical University, studied de-identified health measures from a total of 296,078 women and girls (approximately 1.3% of the total population) between 16-55 years old. These data came from Taiwan's Longitudinal Health Insurance Database starting 2000 (LHID 2000), a representative subsample from Taiwan's nation-wide health insurance database.
The study sample exclusively included women and girls without any recorded history of dysmenorrhea before 2000. The authors looked for a long-term association between the risk of dysmenorrhea and air quality, in particular the mean exposure over the years to air pollutants - nitrogen oxide (NOx), nitric oxide (NO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), carbon monoxide (CO), and particles smaller than 2.5 μm in diameter ('PM2.5') - obtained from the 'Taiwan Air Quality Monitoring Database' (TAQMD) of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Air pollutants are an important new risk factor
They found that from 2000- to 2013, 4.2% of women and girls in the studied sample were diagnosed with dysmenorrhea for the first time. As was expected from previous studies, younger women, women of lower incomes, and living in more urbanized areas tended to have a higher risk of developing dysmenorrhea over the study period. But importantly, the 'hazard ratio' (that is, the age- and year-specific risk) of developing dysmenorrhea increased by 16.7 to 33.1 fold for women and girls from the 25% of areas with the highest yearly exposure to air pollutants, compared to those from the 25% of areas with the lowest exposure. NOx, NO, NO2, CO, and PM2.5 levels each contributed separately to the increased risk, but the greatest individual effect was from long-term exposure to high PM2.5.
"Our results study demonstrate the major impact of the quality of air on human health in general, here specifically on the risk of dysmenorrhea in women and girls. This is a clear illustration of the need to for actions by governmental agencies and citizens to reduce air pollution, in order to improve human health," concludes Prof Hsu.
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-07-06
A study led by University of Barcelona researchers and carried out together with more than 1,650 students and their family members from 18 educational centres in Barcelona shows that citizen science is a valid approach able for doing high quality science, and in this case, able to provide nitrogen dioxide values with an unprecedented resolution and to assess the impact of the pollution in the health of their inhabitants.
The journal Science of the Total Environment has published the results of a study carried out by the research group OpenSystems of the University of Barcelona, the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), promoted by La Caixa Foundation ...
2021-07-06
Participants at the 6th Joint Science Conference of the Western Balkans Process have developed a "10 Point Plan" to control the coronavirus pandemic in the Western Balkans. Participants at the virtual two-day meeting also discussed priorities for the time after the pandemic in the Western Balkans and South East Europe. These include a decent healthcare system, climate neutrality, reduction of air and water pollution, and the digitalization of education, public administration, industry and healthcare. The conference was jointly organized by the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Polish Academy of Sciences as part of the Western Balkans ...
2021-07-06
Although hypomorph mammals (or equids) are currently represented by only one genus ('Equus') and just a handful of species of horses, donkeys and zebras, they were more diverse during the Eocene epoch (between 56 and 33.9 million years ago). One of the most widespread groups in Europe, which was an archipelago at that time, were the palaeotheriidae, named after the genus 'Palaeotherium', described in 1804 from fossils originating in the quarries of Montmartre (Paris) by the famous French naturalist George Cuvier.
The international Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology has recently published a paper on a study led by Leire Perales-Gogenola describing two new species of palaeotheriidae mammals that inhabited the subtropical landscape of Zambrana (Álava) ...
2021-07-06
Big hydropower plants are an important source of clean and cheap electricity for many countries in Southeast Asia. However, dams harm the environment and have dire consequences on local communities. Building more dams would therefore pose major trade-offs between electricity supply and environmental protection.
A team of scientists based in Singapore showed that these two challenges can be decoupled. Their study, titled "Solar energy and regional coordination as a feasible alternative to large hydropower in Southeast Asia", recently published in Nature Communications, showed that there are more sustainable pathways to a clean energy future (refer to figure below).
Building on high resolution mathematical models of the Thai, Laotian, and Cambodian ...
2021-07-06
Researchers from Skoltech and the Mental Health Research Center have found 22 lipids in the blood plasma of people with schizophrenia that were associated with lower symptom improvement over time during treatment. These can help track resistance to medication that affects over a third of patients. The paper was published in the journal Biomolecules.
Studies suggest that up to 34% of people living with schizophrenia can be resistant to two or more antipsychotic medications used to treat the disorder. Individual responses vary greatly, and there are no satisfactory biomarkers of treatment response yet, which can often turn finding the right medication into a painful ...
2021-07-06
TAMPA, Fla. (July 6, 2021) - All it takes is three consecutive nights of sleep loss to cause your mental and physical well-being to greatly deteriorate. A new study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine looked at the consequences of sleeping fewer than six hours for eight consecutive nights - the minimum duration of sleep that experts say is necessary to support optimal health in average adults.
Lead author Soomi Lee, assistant professor in the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida, found the biggest jump in symptoms appeared after just one night of sleep loss. The number of mental and physical problems steadily got worse, peaking on day three. At that point, research shows the human body got relatively used to repeated sleep loss. But that all ...
2021-07-06
Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Daowei Lin, Zhixiao Han, Yanni Fu, Xiaoqiu Zhu, Jin Li, Hui Xu, Jing Wen, Fei Wang and Mingyan Guo from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong, China, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China and University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA discuss how interscalene brachial plexus block combined with general anesthesia attenuates stress and inflammatory response in arthroscopic shoulder surgery.
In arthroscopic shoulder surgery, general ...
2021-07-06
Singapore, 7 July 2021 - In 1966, The Beatles cemented the plight of lonely older people in the popular imagination with the iconic 'Eleanor Rigby', a song that turned pop music on its head when it stayed at number one on the British charts for four weeks. Today, the impact of loneliness in old age on life and health expectancy has been categorically quantified for the first time in a study by scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School (Singapore), Nihon University (Tokyo, Japan) and their collaborators, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
"We found that lonely older adults can expect to live a shorter life than their peers who don't perceive themselves as ...
2021-07-06
Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Xiao'en Shi, Xu Zhang, Xinlu Zhang, Haizhen Guo and Sheng Wang from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China discuss the integration of reactive oxygen species generation and prodrug activation for cancer therapy.
The combination of chemotherapeutic drugs and reactive oxygen species (ROS) can improve cancer treatment outcome. Many ROS-generation strategies can specifically consume tumor-inherent oxygen and generate ROS, resulting in amplified ROS level and aggravated hypoxia. Therefore, the ROS generation strategy can integrate with prodrug activation strategy to realize synergetic therapy.
In recent years, stimuli-responsive nanomedicines have ...
2021-07-06
Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new stars. However, for the first time, a team led by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Arianna di Cintio, has shown using numerical simulations that this is not always the case. The results of the study were recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
Using sophisticated simulations of the whole of the Local Group of galaxies, including the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy and their respective satellite ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Study is first to show that air pollutants increase risk of painful periods for women