Survey study, 2019
What is the best way to diagnose PMS using blood tests and symptom patterns?
A new diagnostic method called MCAS combines daily symptom tracking with blood tests for hormones and immune markers. This method was validated by multiple blood biomarkers and performed better than standard diagnostic criteria.
What they did
Researchers reviewed papers about how PMS is currently diagnosed and what blood markers are found in women with PMS. They noted that different diagnostic methods find different results, suggesting standard methods miss many women with PMS. Based on this review, they proposed a new diagnostic approach using daily symptom records and blood biomarkers.
What they found
The new diagnosis MCAS was validated by multiple blood biomarkers including progesterone, estradiol, chemokines (CCL2, CCL5, CCL11), epidermal growth factor, hydroperoxides, paraoxonase 1 activity, and complement C4. This new approach performed better than the standard American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) diagnostic criteria.
What it means for you
This review suggests that tracking symptoms daily and checking blood markers for immune and hormone changes may identify PMS more accurately than current methods. However, because this is based on reviewing past research rather than testing the new method on a large group, more research is needed to confirm whether this approach works better in practice.
MCAS
New diagnosis method proposed
multiple
Blood biomarkers identified
daily
Symptom tracking frequency
About the study
- Original title
- Biomarker Validation of a New Case Definition of Menstrual Cycle-Associated Syndrome (MCAS)
- Authors
- Roomruangwong C, Maes M
- Journal
- Preprints.org
- Year
- 2019
- Study design
- Survey study
- Read the paper
- doi.org/10.20944/preprints201912.0012.v1
Original abstract
Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) frequently occurs in women of childbearing age. There are different case definitions of PMS, one proposed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and another based on the Daily Record of Severity of Problems (DRSP) scores. Here we review our recent papers indicating that the discovery of biomarkers of menstrual cycle-related symptoms is strongly dependent on the case definitions used and that the gold standard methods used to asses PMS, including the ACOG case definition, induce a high degree of false-negative findings. We propose a new case definition of the menstrual cycle-associated syndrome (MCAS), which is characterized by increased DRSP scores during the menstrual cycle and additionally by an exaggerated increase in symptoms the week prior to the menses. This case definition performed well and was externally validated by diverse biomarkers including plasma levels of progesterone and estradiol, chemokines (e.g. CCL2, CCL5 and CCL11), epidermal growth factor, hydroperoxides, paraoxonase 1 activity and complement C4. In conclusion, when evaluating menstrual cycle-related symptoms and their associations with biomarkers, we propose to assess daily measurements of the DRSP and based on those scores to a) use the diagnosis of MCAS as an indicant of menstrual cycle-related symptoms; and b) examine the associations of the time series in the DRSP and its subdomains (e.g. depression, physio-somatic, anxiety) and those in biomarkers including distributed lag models.
Reproduced under CC-BY.