Doctors are puzzled

Is premenstrual syndrome a hormonal disease or is it due to psychosocial causes? There is very convincing evidence that it is associated with hormones, because during the week preceding menstruation, the level of female hormones, estrogen and progesterone varies, and during menopause, the monthly recurring symptoms disappear. However, the researchers, who hospitalized women with a pronounced premenstrual syndrome and measured their hormone levels at different times, never showed any significant deviation from the norm. Englishwoman Karina Dalton in one of her early works as a remedy against premenstrual syndrome advised using progesterone. Although some women with premenstrual syndrome reported that progesterone was relieved, even willing to swear by it, most studies claimed that the hormone helps no more than placebo. In one study, limited in scope, women suffering from premenstrual syndrome received estrogen, usually prescribed in the case of severe menopausal symptoms.
A bit of light on these contradictory data is shed by the most recent studies described in an article published in the "New English Medical Journal." In these studies, patients suffering from premenstrual syndrome were given a drug that was supposed to prevent hormonal changes, usually occurring in the premenstrual phase of the cycle. However, the condition of women receiving this medication did not change for the better, which led researchers to think about other causes of the disease may be, the syndrome is caused by hormonal changes in another phase of the cycle or the disorder has no causal relationship with the menstrual cycle, but is only synchronized with it in time .
Some researchers have studied the possible relationship between premenstrual syndrome and thyroid dysfunction, seasonal emotional disorder, diurnal rhythm disorders, which are treated with dosed irradiation with bright light of the full spectrum. But until now, premenstrual syndrome remains an equally mysterious ailment, as in 1931, when the obstetrician-gynecologist Robert Frank, MD, first used the term to describe the cyclical disorder of the psychological state that his patients suffered.