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A team of researchers made up of the group behind the fertility app Clue and a group at Oxford University have tested the popularly held notion that when women live or work in close proximity for a span of time, they find their menstrual cycles begin to sync with one another. But as researchers note in their article on the Clue website, such notions appear to be completely false.
It is a commonly held notion that women who live or work together, or just spend a lot of time together, find their menstrual cycles syncing. There was even a study done in 1971 by Harvard researcher Martha McClintock tracking the menstrual cycles of female colleges students sharing a dorm. But, as the researchers with this new effort note, no other studies have found it to be true, and McClintock's work has been discredited. But sill the myth persists. To perhaps put an end to the debate, the researchers conducted a test trial with women who use the Clue app—1500 women responded to their request for assistance in a trial and out of those, 360 pairs of women were selected for inclusion. Each were in a close relationship with another woman over an extended period of time. Because the app helps women track and share their period information, the data was already available; all that was needed was for the users to share it with the researchers.
The researchers looked back three menstrual cycles for each of the pairs to see if any alignment was occurring and report that 273 of them actually had cycles that diverged—just 79 were seen to converge. They note that women who were living together were no more aligned than the other pairs. This, they insist, is further proof that the entire idea is a myth with no basis in reality.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by rleigh on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:27AM (5 children)
I don't think the conclusions of this invalidate earlier observations, and I also don't think that "crowdsourcing" data is a substitute for a controlled scientific experiment.
Think about why the process is thought to happen. Hormones such as œstrogen, progesterone and testosterone are able to diffuse out of the body, and potentially affect others in close proximity. Consider the factors which might affect an individual:
- proximity to sources
- duration of contact
- number of sources
- external influences
- time of observation period
The original study was in a college dorm. This study was mainly couples and households. These are two very different situations. In the college or nunnery environment you have close, fairly persistent contact with a large quantity of other people, and the group is somewhat insular--the makeup of the group might be essentially fixed for a year or more. In this study, you have self-selected couples and small groups, which may be in less frequent contact and smaller in number--are they together all day, every day? Given that the effect comes down to the physical concentration of freely diffusing hormones, it may not be of a sufficiently high concentration to exert a noticeable effect during the observation period, which was "no less than three cycles", i.e. not very long. External influences includes changes in the group makeup, and also external hormone sources. Maybe they weren't sufficiently isolated from the general population or members or associates of the group were on drugs or oral or other contraceptives which perturbed the effect, particularly if it's very subtle.
If they want a definitive answer, then I think they need to do this under controlled conditions. That would mean creating a group of people with known different cycles and having them live in continuous close proximity for an extended period and with minimal outside contact. Could be done in e.g. college accommodation, nunnery, open prison. The logistics are why it's likely not to have been done before. But I don't think crowdsourcing lots of data can replace that.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Thursday April 20 2017, @08:18AM
You forget the other possible sources of hormones, in food and water. It is more likely that the large groups living in closer proximity are eating similar food and definitely drinking the same water, while people who only just work together or just live together may be more likely to eat and drink in different locations. I've always wondered who would sync to who? Whoever produces the most hormones? What if there was an external source that they were all (apparently) independently syncing to?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @09:41AM
Even having sex can have an influence on the cycle. Tracking women in student dorms... well... sex can happen a lot. Also, some women have very irregular cycles, which requires some tracking during the monitoring stage and corrections in the data afterwards.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DBCubix on Thursday April 20 2017, @02:04PM (1 child)
Following up on the parent's insights w.r.t. proximity; the other glaring error was that three cycles is a really insufficient time period. Had this paper come across my desk I would have rejected it on the methodology alone.
(Score: 1) by Roger Murdock on Friday April 21 2017, @03:02AM
I think the idea was to see if sync'ing of the cycles had ALREADY occurred, not if it was in the process of occurring. One cycle probably would have been enough.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday April 21 2017, @04:03AM
See my earlier reply, the original study used a badly flawed methodology. I'll have to dig up the stats text where I read the analysis to provide accurate details, rather than trying to reconstruct them right now from memory.