What can period blood reveal about a person’s health?
The FDA recently approved the first diagnostic test based on menstrual blood
When you think of getting tested for a disease, you might think first of nasal swabs, urine tests, blood draws. Even though around 1.8 billion people across the world menstruate, period blood doesn’t come to mind.
But that might soon change. Earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the first time approved a health test based on period blood. The at-home test, which detects a biomarker for diabetes, offers an alternative to the blood draws typically required to diagnose the disease. It’s also a first step in a long-term vision for researcher Sara Naseri, CEO and cofounder of Qvin, the San Francisco Bay Area–based company that makes the test.
“Women bleed every month, so why let that go to waste?” Naseri remembers wondering a decade ago as a medical student. Period blood, she thought, could be a convenient way to get clues to a person’s health — no needles required. When she couldn’t find much research on the approach, she decided to look into it herself.
Then at Stanford University School of Medicine, she and her colleagues found that “menstrual blood is in fact blood,” she says, and “essential health information can be gleaned from it.”
That preliminary study, reported in 2019, compared samples of menstrual blood with blood that circulates through the body from 20 women over two months. The team concluded that — including for diabetes and inflammation — as well as reproductive hormones, and so could be an alternative source for diagnosis and health monitoring.
Since then, Naseri and colleagues have further tested menstrual blood and studied whether that put a person at a high risk for cervical cancer can be detected in the blood.
But anthropologist Kathryn Clancy says it’s too early to be rolling out products based on menstrual blood testing. She researches women’s health, endometrial function and evolutionary medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign and is author of the book . “Menstrual blood is super interesting, but it looks like the only test that they’re able to do is A1C,” which measures average glucose levels in the blood. And that test, she points out, “is very easily done with a regular [blood] test.”
For now, Clancy would like to see more effort and money put into the still-nascent research, which is what will best serve people’s needs. At the same time, she’s intrigued by the idea of using menstrual blood for medical tests.
Testing for diabetes is a good place to start.