Menstrual cycle characteristics may have implications for women's fecundability and risk of hormonally related diseases. Certain pesticides disrupt the estrous cycle in animals. The authors investigated the cross-sectional association between pesticide use and menstrual function among 3,103 women living on farms in Iowa and North Carolina. Women were aged 21-40 years, premenopausal, not pregnan...

BACKGROUND Previous inconsistent results suggest that menstrual cycles may be disturbed by exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and 1,1-dichloro-2,2-bis (p-chlorophenyl)-ethylene (DDE). METHODS Information on menstrual cycle characteristics were obtained by questionnaires, and PCB and DDE were measured in serum samples from a total of 1494 women from Greenland, Swedish fishermen's wiv...

Women take oral contraceptives for contraception but also for menstrual dysfunction treatment. This raises the question of whether or not women with menstrual dysfunction are underrepresented in analyses of menstrual function because oral contraceptive users are excluded. To explore this, the authors examined the history of oral contraceptive use among 1322 Black women and White women, aged 35-...

Increasing numbers of young women are employed as gasoline station attendants in most developing countries despite the lack of empirical data on the adverse reproductive health effect of this solvent. This study therefore sought to assess the effects of gasoline inhalation on the serum sex hormone profile and menstrual characteristics of female gasoline station attendants in Nigeria, given the ...

In previous studies of the relationship between stress and menstrual cycles, stress has been found to be associated with longer cycles, to be associated with shorter cycles, and to have no association with cycle length. Some of the menstrual cycle changes that have been attributed to stress are similar to those experienced by women during perimenopause. In an effort to see whether an associatio...

Colonial variants of Neisseria gonorrhoeae differing in color and opacity characteristics are distributed differently between male urethral and female cervical cultures. Colonial characteristics of cultures isolated from female cervices differ with time of isolation within the menstrual cycle and use of oral contraceptives. These differences may reflect selective forces in the ecology of the ce...

Voice onset time (VOT) is a salient acoustic parameter of speech which signals the 'voiced' and 'voiceless' status of plosives in English (e.g. the initial sound in 'bat' versus the initial sound in 'pat'). As a micro-temporal acoustic parameter, VOT may be sensitive to changes in hormones which may affect the neuromuscular systems involved in speech production. This study adopted a novel appro...