Ovulation

Irregular Periods – a common health problem with women

Periods can sometimes be a real pain. They can make you feel sick. They can give you a headache. They can make your stomach ache. Yes, periods can be a real pain, and things can be even worse if they decide to become irregular.
Cycles between 23–35 days are very common. A woman may get her period only one to four times a year. Or she might have periods that occur two to three times in a month and involve spotting or extremely heavy flow. Alternatively, she may have heavy episodes of bleeding every two to three months. Irregular periods are simply what is irregular for you.
A wide variety of factors can be responsible for irregular periods, among them:
- Significant weight gain or loss.
- Over-exercise.
- Poor nutrition (or a diet too high in carbohydrates).
- Smoking.
- Drug use.
- Caffeine.
- Excessive alcohol use (interfering with how the liver metabolizes estrogen and progesterone).
- Eating disorders.
- Increased stress.
- Polycystic ovarian syndrome/estrogen dominance.
- Uterine abnormalities (fibroids/cysts/polyps/endometriosis).
- Hormonal imbalance related to perimenopause.
- Medications.
- Chemotherapy.
- Recent childbirth, miscarriage, or D&C.
- Breastfeeding.

Why does being stressed out cause irregular periods?

When we are under stress, our adrenal glands are designed to secrete the hormone cortisol which has a direct impact on the sex hormones estrogen, progesterone, and DHEA.
Eating disorders, dieting, drug use, and reliance on stimulants like caffeine and alcohol are also interpreted by the body as kinds of stress. Poor nutrition seems to physically change the proteins in the brain so they can no longer send the proper signals for normal ovulation.

Irregular menstrual periods in young women may be a warning sign of a hormonal shortage that could lead to osteoporosis. Premature ovarian failure occurs when the ovaries stop producing eggs and reproductive hormones well in advance of natural menopause.

Treating Irregular Periods

Depending on the cause of your irregular periods, there may or may not be much you can do about them.
- Reduce your stress levels.
- Get help for your eating disorder.
- Don’t over exercise.

Medical Treatments

There are a few medical treatments which may be helpful in regulating your period:
- Hormonal Contraceptives : These contraceptives combine estrogen and progesterone and maintain your body’s hormones at specific and balanced levels.
- Hormone Supplements: If you have a specific hormone problem, such as overproduction of testosterone, hormonal supplements may be able to help regulate your periods.

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Basal Body Temperature – BBT

Basal body temperature is the lowest temperature attained by the body during rest (usually during sleep). It is generally measured immediately after awakening and before any physical activity has been undertaken, although the temperature measured at that time is somewhat higher than the true basal body temperature. In women, ovulation causes an increase of one-half to one degree Fahrenheit (one-quarter to one-half degree Celsius) in basal body temperature (BBT); monitoring of BBTs is one way of estimating the day of ovulation.
Worldwide, the basal body temperature method is the oldest and most widely practiced of the fertility awareness methods.

HOW ?
This method is useful to confirm that a woman is ovulating each month and by recording her temperature on a chart over several months she can begin to predict when the most fertile days of her cycle are going to be, which is of course necessary for couples either trying to obtain, or trying to avoid, pregnancy.
If a woman has regular cycles she could use this method to help detect the period of the month that she usually ovulates. In this way she could guess the best time to have intercourse to have the greatest chance of becoming pregnant. However, the BBT method is simply not very easy to use or convenient. It relies on detecting small differences in BBT and this can be unreliable in practice because it is hard for a woman to comply with the testing regime. In addition the results can be influenced by numerous factors including eating spicy food, drinking alcohol, lack of sleep or having a cold. All these things make this method difficult to use and in practice even experienced doctors can find the charts difficult to interpret.

Determining your fertile period

Fertility awareness is a collection of methods using your body’s natural and normal functioning to determine the days of the month you are most likely to get pregnant. The fertility awareness method is used both as a means of preventing pregnancy as well as targeting the most fertile time for getting pregnant.
The most fertile period is that period in a woman’s life when her chances of getting pregnant are the highest. Each month during ovulation the ovary releases an egg or ovum that travels down to the mouth of the fallopian tubules.
To determine the fertile period of a woman it is necessary to study and analyze the menstruation cycle. It varies between 23 and 35 days among women and many classify the cycle into two parts, before ovulation and post ovulation.
The first day of the period is called day one. During day seven the ovum is getting ready for fertilization and during day seven to day eleven the uterine lining thickens getting ready for the implantation of the fertilized ovum. During day fourteen the ovum is released and it travels down the fallopian tubules. If a sperm is waiting for it the ovum is fertilized and implants itself in the uterine lining resulting in pregnancy. The ovum has a life span of only about 12 to 24 hours. Sperm can survive up to 72 hours inside a woman. In the event that it is not fertilized the ovum breaks down and is shed along with the uterine lining during day twenty five.