Sep 18, 2026 · 4 min · 6 segments
A study looks at risk factors for pain with menstruation in adolescents. You can read the full article here. Episode Transcript For more on this story and for others like it, visit the Health Lab…
Pain is often considered a fact of life for people with menstrual cycles.
Yet for an experience that is so common, the risk factors for painful periods have not been closely studied.
A recent study from Melissa Leonard, PhD, and her colleagues at the University of Michigan look more closely at dysmenorrhea, the clinical term for pain that comes with menstruation, in girls before and after their first periods.
The research is born of Leonard's interest in the clinical aspects of pain and collaborative research between U of M's Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center and U of M's Chronic Pelvic Pain Consultative Clinic.
Leonard says, quote, a lot of patients have been saying anecdotally that much of their chronic pelvic pain started when they were kids, end quote.
To investigate this, her team used the analyzed survey responses of more than 2,000 female adolescents and their guardians from the population-based adolescent brain cognitive development study in the USA, focusing on girls who hadn't yet had their period at ages 9 or 10 and then started their periods three years later.
Parent surveys included the child behavior checklist, the sleep disturbance scale for children, and the pubertal development scale, which captured data on non-painful physical symptoms, attention problems, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, and pubertal development at baseline.
Pain is often considered a fact of life for people with menstrual cycles.
Yet for an experience that is so common, the risk factors for painful periods have not been closely studied.
A recent study from Melissa Leonard, PhD, and her colleagues at the University of Michigan look more closely at dysmenorrhea, the clinical term for pain that comes with menstruation, in girls before and after their first periods.
The research is born of Leonard's interest in the clinical aspects of pain and collaborative research between U of M's Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center and U of M's Chronic Pelvic Pain Consultative Clinic.
Leonard says, quote, a lot of patients have been saying anecdotally that much of their chronic pelvic pain started when they were kids, end quote.
To investigate this, her team used the analyzed survey responses of more than 2,000 female adolescents and their guardians from the population-based adolescent brain cognitive development study in the USA, focusing on girls who hadn't yet had their period at ages 9 or 10 and then started their periods three years later.
Parent surveys included the child behavior checklist, the sleep disturbance scale for children, and the pubertal development scale, which captured data on non-painful physical symptoms, attention problems, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, and pubertal development at baseline.
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