Hormones, behaviour and the menstrual cycle.

To date therefore, no consistent hormonal abnormality has been linked with premenstrual affective, physical or behavioural changes and, in turn, no consistent adverse behaviour has been positively linked with any particular menstrual cycle phase. At the same time, the proportion of actively menstruating women reported to identify premenstrual changes of a severity sufficient to warrant the illness label continues to fall so that a figure somewhere between 2 and 8% seems to be established where once figures in excess of 70% were claimed. The implication would seem to be that more thorough assessment of the relatively small number of women who are clearly identifiable as sufferers from cyclically-mediated symptoms might well cast light on possible hormonal-behavioural links where larger, less careful studies of heterogeneous samples of women have failed to do so. The great majority of women appear to negotiate the premenstrual phase of their menstrual cycles with little or no impairment or difficulty. A small number appear to be vulnerable and the possibility that it is, at least in part, a biological vulnerability is hinted at in those reports which tentatively suggest that some women who are especially prone to post-partum 'blues' and who are particularly sensitive to oral contraceptives may be especially prone to premenstrual tension. Finally, the ubiquity of premenstrually perceived 'changes' as distinct from 'symptoms' raises the possibility that the extent to which a woman experiences various premenstrual changes as complaint or illness may depend 'more on her basic personality and the circumstances in which she experiences the cyclical changes than on the underlying cyclical mechanism'.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)