Research Suggests Menstrual Cramps May Alter Women's Brains

USA Today: Menstrual cramps may alter women's brains, by Jennifer Goodwin:

Menstrual cramps are often dismissed as a mere nuisance, but new research suggests the monthly misery may be altering women's brains.

Researchers in Taiwan used a type of brain scan known as optimized voxel-based morphometry to analyze the anatomy of the brains of 32 young women who reported experiencing moderate to severe menstrual cramps on a regular basis for several years, and 32 young women who did not experience much menstrual pain.

Even when they weren't experiencing pain, women who had reported having bad cramps had abnormalities in their gray matter (a type of brain tissue), said study author Dr. Jen-Chuen Hsieh, a professor of neuroscience at the Institute of Brain Science at National Yang-Ming University in Taipei, Taiwan. . . .