Periods, and hormone levels generally, do not interfere with the intellect, according to a study.
Several effects are attributed to menstruation. Pain, fatigue, headaches, bad mood, decline in intellectual capacities… They are not always well known, and often stem more from popular belief than from science.
A study published in the journal Frontiers in Behaviorial Neuroscience puts an end to the popular belief that women perform a little less intellectually when they have their period. The researchers did not observe any significant difference related to this period, nor any relation between cognitive abilities and hormonal levels.
Contradictory results
“As a specialist in reproductive medicine and psychotherapist, I meet many women who have the impression that their menstrual cycle influences their well-being and their cognitive performance”, explains Prof. Brigitte Leeners, endocrinologist at the University Hospital of Zurich, and lead author of the study.
The idea was reinforced by some scientific results. Two studies had shown that on certain cognitive tasks for which men or women are respectively more efficient, the periods of the female cycle could influence and reinforce these differences.
The natural deficit of women on visual-spatial tasks would thus be reinforced during the phases of the cycle with little estrogen and progesterone (just before and during menstruation), while their advantage over verbal tasks is reinforced when these hormones are present (during and after ovulation).
Other fluctuations in memorization skills had been associated with changes in hormone levels.
Exceptions
These results could not be reproduced, explains the researchers in their article. For their study, they recruited 88 women, whom they followed for two cycles. The researchers analyzed the evolution of three cognitive processes: visuospatial memory, attention, and cognitive bias – a thought mechanism that interferes with logical reasoning.
And their results, associated with hormonal levels, do not show any decisive impact linked to periods of the cycle. During the first cycle, differences appeared, during and outside the period of menstruation, but they could not be replicated thereafter.
“Although some individual exceptions may appear, female cognitive performance is not disturbed by hormonal changes occurring during the menstrual cycle. And even if some differences should appear, they seem so limited that they are at best minimal.
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