Golden fever for menstrual blood
· ★
Long dismissed as unsanitary, menstrual blood may be a gold mine for medicine, from diagnosing endometriosis and HPV to stem-cell therapies.
Menstrual blood was, for centuries, looked down upon as something unsanitary, gross, and inconvenient, which, after all, comes from the societal shamefulness of menstruation itself. However, as more and more research is being done on women’s health, it seems that menstrual blood (MB) could be the gold mine for modern medicine.
It is not just this red fluid leaving our body every month; rather, it is a complex mixture of blood, immune cells, hormones, cells from the uterine lining, proteins, and so much more. Given its heterogeneous composition, the research interest in MB has risen exponentially, revealing multiple benefits, such as noninvasive diagnosis of many different gynecological conditions and helping with regenerative medicine, infertility, and neurological diseases through menstrual blood-derived stem cells (MenSCs).
Menstrual blood as a diagnostic sample has multiple advantages such as periodic availability, self-collection ability, and noninvasiveness, which could prevent the discomfort and stress of currently used methods (such as Pap smear or fine needle aspiration). As already mentioned, MB could potentially help diagnose a whole line of diseases, such as endometriosis. The diagnosis of endometriosis currently takes about 9 years because of the normalisation of the symptoms. However, as menstrual blood also contains endometrial tissue, scientists found markers that appear elevated in women suffering from endometriosis. Specifically, inflammatory proteins CXCL5 and IL1RN appear at significantly higher levels in MB from people with endometriosis than in healthy women.
Scientists also found MB to be a good identifier for high-risk strains of HPV, which can put a person at risk for cervical cancer, which remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality among women. The availability of MB could help with early detection and intervention at the early precancerous stages.
Moreover, menstrual blood is also useful in diagnosing diseases not related to reproductive health. It has proven useful in diagnosing diabetes, as the sugar content in menstrual blood was shown to reflect sugar content in the blood of the whole body. Early studies additionally show that MB could pinpoint immune diseases, as there seems to be a clear relation between endometriosis and autoimmune diseases.
But as I already mentioned, MB has potential beyond diagnosis and screening. Menstrual blood-derived stem cells (MenSCs) could be the future of stem-cell-based therapies. Not only do they have a high proliferation rate and ability to differentiate into various types of cells (and therefore treat not only women, but also men), but they can also be collected noninvasively, and are able to double in 18- 36 hours, which is significantly faster than bone marrow cells, which take 2-8 days.
In the future, MenSCs could help treat infertility (through endometrial tissue remodeling and thus creating optimal conditions for embryo implantation), but also Alzheimer’s disease (as it has been shown to reduce amyloid plaques, suppress tau tangles, and enhance the ability of microglia to be neuroprotective) and much more, such as treating diabetes, musculoskeletal and soft tissue injury, and chronic liver disease.
However, we are still decades away from all this being used in practice, but at least we can see that menstrual blood is indeed the future of modern medicine, and we can only benefit from further research on women’s bodies.