Effects of a premenstrual syndrome education program on premenstrual symptomatology

Abstract

This exploratory study was conducted to determine the effects of an educational program on the number and severity of premenstrual symptoms as well as the number of premenstrual days with symptoms. Participants were a convenience sample of 47 employed women, whose scores on Abraham's Menstrual Symptomatology Questionnaire were in the moderate to severe range. Women were randomly divided into control and experimental groups, and those in the experimental groups participated in an education program. Both groups recorded daily on Abraham's Menstrual Symptom Diary for 19 anxiety, appetite, edema, and depression symptoms. Participants in the education program had fewer occurrences of anxiety and appetite symptoms and fewer severe edema and depression symptoms, as well as fewer days with symptoms, than women who did not participate in the educational program. The findings support the idea that client education can promote self-care and improve health status.

An intervention to empower and engage the self help groups for menstrual hygeine in Karnataka, India

“…But an increase in knowledge does not always cause behavior to change. 21,22 The present study was in agreement with Seidman (1990) 23 who stated that women's knowledge seemed to affect their practices during menstruation. In the existing Indian cultural milieu, the society is interwoven into a set of traditions, myths and misconceptions especially about menstruation and related issues.…”

Psychological Intervention for Premenstrual Syndrome: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

“…Disagreement resulted in full text article retrieval. 27 trials were retrieved in full text to confirm eligibility and 14 proved potentially eligible [9, 10,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,26,27,28,29,30]. …”

“…and C.K.) collected all reported measures, including all domains, and grouped them into 6 discreet categories: anxiety [10, 15, 17, 20], behavioral changes [14, 16], depression [10,15,16,17,18, 20], interference [10, 16], sexual relations [10, 19], and water retention and edema [16, 17]. These groupings included outcome measures from all eligible trials except for the study by Corney et al [9] as this trial only reported an aggregate ‘premenstrual symptom score’.…”

“…We had only a single a priori hypothesis to explain variability between studies, and that was the type of psychological intervention. In order to ascertain if certain interventions might be grouped together, a psychologist and a psychiatrist with formal research training, blinded to trial results, independently categorized each trial intervention and showed perfect agreement in categorizing interventions as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) [9, 10,14,15,16], educational therapy [17, 18], or monitoring [19, 20]. …”

“…All trials began with a 1–3-month period of no treatment to assess baseline measures, and for the purposes of our analysis we decided, a priori, to use the baseline measures acquired closest in time to randomization. All trials except for two [16, 17] provided data at 3 months following initiation of treatment, and we decided, before analyzing the data, to capture outcomes at this time point for purposes of generating a pooled effect. For the two trials [16, 17] that did not collect outcomes at 3 months after initiating treatment, the closest data collection time point was chosen (1 month following initiation of treatment).…”