Fatigue, mood swings, painful chest, bloating, spots… Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) affects 20 to 40% of women of childbearing age, according to Inserm. This series of physical and psychological symptoms, which are of varying intensity, occurs during the luteal phase (between ovulation and the following period) and disappears after the arrival of menstruation. Although these manifestations are not serious, they are painful, even disabling, for patients.
Suicide: twice the risk in women with premenstrual disorders
In a recent study, researchers from the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) revealed that people with premenstrual disorders are more likely to commit suicide. To reach this conclusion, they analyzed data from several Swedish registries and traced the mortality rates of 67,748 patients who were diagnosed with premenstrual syndrome at the age of 35 between 2001 and 2018. Their information was compared to that of 406,488 unaffected women. The team took into account several factors, such as age, socioeconomic status, and somatic and psychiatric comorbidities.
According to the results, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, 367 deaths were recorded in affected volunteers with menstrual disorders and 1,958 deaths were recorded in participants without this syndrome during a six-year follow-up. Women with menstrual disorders were more likely to die from unnatural causes. In detail, they were on average twice as likely to commit suicide. The analysis also showed that patients who received a diagnosis before the age of 25 experienced higher all-cause mortality, death from both suicide and natural causes.
Finding the causes of a higher risk of suicide
“Additional work is needed to find the reasons for this higher suicide risk. (…) This research confirms the importance of careful monitoring of young patients and highlights the need to develop suicide prevention strategies for all women suffering from premenstrual syndrome”, the authors concluded.
