Breaking News

Hundreds Reported Abnormal Menstruation After Exposure to Tear Gas, Study Finds


At some point last summer, there were just too many reports of protesters who had experienced abnormal menstrual cycles after being exposed to tear gas for Britta Torgrimson-Ojerio, a nurse researcher at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, to dismiss them as coincidence.

A preschool teacher told Oregon Public Broadasting that if she inhaled a significant amount of gas at night, she’d get her period the next morning. Other Portland residents shared stories of periods that lasted for weeks and of unusual spotting. Transgender men described sudden periods that defied hormones that had kept menstruation at bay for months or years.

Dr. Torgrimson-Ojerio decided she would try to figure out whether these anecdotes were outliers or representative of a more common phenomenon. She surveyed around 2,200 adults who said they had been exposed to tear gas in Portland last summer. In a study published this week in the journal BMC Public Health, she reported that 899 of them — more than 54 percent of the respondents who potentially menstruate — said they had experienced abnormal menstrual cycles.

“Even though we cannot say anything scientifically definitive about these chemical agents and a causal relationship to menstrual irregularities,” Dr. Torgrimson-Ojerio said, “we can definitively say that in our study most people who had menstrual cycles or a uterus reported menstrual irregularities after reporting exposure to tear gas.”

Downstream effects, like the impact on fertility, are not known, but “this is our call to action to ask our scientific community to turn their eye to this issue,” she said.

Dr. Torgrimson-Ojerio was also interested in whether people had experienced other problems more than a few hours after being exposed to tear gas. She found that 80 percent of survey participants had, with difficulty breathing being among the most prevalent complaints.

Kira Taylor, a professor of epidemiology and population health at the University of Louisville School of Public Health and Information Sciences who is conducting a similar study, said that Dr. Torgrimson-Ojerio’s study provided “some of the first solid evidence” that tear gas might be linked to menstrual abnormalities. It is also “the first study to document the longer-term effects of tear gas exposure in a large population,” she said.

Sven-Eric Jordt, a professor of anesthesiology, pharmacology and cancer biology at the Duke University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study, applauded the work.

Most of the research that police agencies and the government rely on to inform them about tear gas safety “are outdated, often 50 to 70 years old, and don’t measure up to modern toxicological approaches,” he said. “Most of these studies were conducted in young healthy men at the time, either police or military, and not in women, or in a general civilian population representing protesters.”

Nor can the study answer how or why tear gas might be contributing to menstrual irregularities or to what extent other factors are also involved. The authors acknowledge that the high levels of stress and anxiety among protesters, for example, could also have contributed to the physical response.



Shared From Source link Breaking News

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *