Does discovery of 'severe PMS genes' offer hope of a cure?

Conclusion PMDD can make life extremely difficult. While hormone treatments and antidepressants help some women, you can't use hormone treatments if you're trying to get pregnant, and they have side effects that mean they're not suitable for everyone. Finding out more about the condition is a first step to understanding it, and might lead to better treatments in the long term. This early-stage research shows that the genetic make-up and response cells have to hormones may have a hand in how likely women are to get PMDD. But we're a long way from knowing for sure if these cell responses are actually a cause of PMDD. It's possible that the differences seen by the researchers might be the result of reverse causality – in other words, having a long-term mood disorder has shaped how the cells respond to hormones, rather than the other way around. The groups in this study were not matched in terms of previous history of a major depressive episode, which had occurred in a quarter of women with PMDD. And as this was not a randomised controlled trial, there may have been other unmeasured differences between the two groups that could account for the differences seen. Because the researchers only looked at a small number of women with PMDD, we don't know if this research has any relevance to the much more common premenstrual syndrome (PMS), which includes symptoms of irritability, breast tenderness, mood swings and bloating. The researchers say "it would only be a matte...
Source: NHS News Feed - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Genetics/stem cells Lifestyle/exercise Source Type: news