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Evidence shows link between endometriosis and physical traumatic experiences

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An international study has found new evidence linking traumatic experiences and stressful events with endometriosis – revealing that the condition appears to be closely linked to trauma involving contact, such as in physical abuse or sexual assault.

Through genetic analysis, the researchers found that this relationship seems to be independent of genetic predisposition to endometriosis. The findings could be helpful to take into account when diagnosing endometriosis, which affects 190 million women of reproductive age worldwide.

Dora Koller, first author of the article and researcher at the Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics of the UB’s Faculty of Biology, notes that: “While psychological trauma has been associated with endometriosis, to date, there has been little information on the role of the type of trauma and genetic predisposition.

“These results challenge established paradigms by uncovering shared genetic mechanisms linking endometriosis with post-traumatic stress disorder and other types of trauma, while providing new insights into how different types of traumatic events are associated with the disease.”

The study was based on observational and genetic data analyses from 8,276 women with endometriosis and 240,117 controls in the UK Biobank, a biomedical database containing anonymised genetic, lifestyle and health information, as well as biological samples from people in the United Kingdom.

“Our study shows that people with endometriosis were more likely to report having experienced certain traumatic events compared to healthy people,” said Koller.

For example, people with endometriosis were 17 per cent more likely to have witnessed a sudden death, 16 per cent more likely to have experienced sexual assault in adulthood and 36 per cent more likely to have received a life-threatening diagnosis.

To explore the connection between different types of trauma, the researchers conducted a latent class analysis, a research tool that unravels hidden clusters in a dataset.

“More cases of endometriosis could be linked to emotional, physical and sexual trauma,” said Koller.

Post-traumatic stress disorder and child abuse

The genetic analyses in the study consisted mainly of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of endometriosis and also an analysis of the interaction between traumatic events and the polygenic risk of endometriosis, an approach that assesses the combined impact of multiple genetic variants on the development of a disease, rather than focusing on a single gene.

The results of these analyses have revealed that the disease correlates genetically with several trauma-related conditions, with the strongest evidence being linked to post-traumatic stress disorder and child abuse.

Koller said: “Childhood trauma, for example, feeling hated by a family member as a child and being physically abused by the family, was also linked to endometriosis, highlighting the potential role of early adverse experiences in shaping the risk and progression of endometriosis.”

Other genetically inferred relationships included situations related to having someone who could take study participants to the doctor during childhood.

According to the researcher, this would be “especially important” in the case of endometriosis, since having caregivers who ensure access to medical care during this stage of life may influence stress resilience and care-seeking behaviour, reducing the likelihood of under-diagnosis and under-treatment.

“People who lack caregiver support may be less likely to defend their health,” Koller said.

Mechanisms which do not depend on the genetic predisposition

The results also show that the relationship between the genetic risk of endometriosis and trauma does not seem to be due to a direct interaction between genes and environment, but would be explained by correlations between genes and environment.

That is, for example, people with a certain genetic predisposition may be more likely to experience or remember certain traumatic events, which could influence their risk of developing endometriosis.

“Based on the reclassification proposed by Hugh Taylor  – co-author of the current study – of endometriosis as a chronic systemic disease with manifestations outside the reproductive tract, our findings highlight how childhood and adult trauma may contribute to the pathogenesis of endometriosis with mechanisms that appear independent of the genetic predisposition,” said Koller.

An early diagnosis strategy

The associations identified between endometriosis and traumatic events are consistent with a previous study by the same research team that linked the disease to depression, anxiety and eating disorders.

These combined findings highlight the importance of assessing the physical and mental health of patients with endometriosis.

“Although the results need to be confirmed in other cohorts, they suggest that we may be able to design early endometriosis screening programmes that consider not only genetic factors, but also a history of physical trauma or other risk factors. This would help to identify and treat the disease more comprehensively and effectively,” Koller said.

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Dozens of women report suffering painful burns after using Always sanitary towels

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Dozens of women have claimed online that Always sanitary towels caused painful burns, prompting a response from the Procter & Gamble-owned brand.

Several TikTok users have posted videos describing reactions to the company’s products in recent days.

The clips, which have gained thousands of views, include complaints of itching, rashes and what users describe as chemical burns — skin damage caused by contact with irritating substances.

In one video viewed 45,000 times, user @ratqueen910 said the pads gave her “the worst chemical burns ever” in her groin area, where underwear meets the leg.

“When I looked at the burn with the flash on it really looked like my skin was gooey! I was scared af,” she told commenters.

She said she first thought the pain was chafing or an allergic reaction to spandex in her underwear, before seeing other women online describe the same symptoms.

“I realised that so many people have had problems the last few months with these pads,” she said.

“It’s not like, ‘oh, I switched over to Always pads’ — no, I’ve used them since I was in like sixth grade.

“So they must have changed the formula, messed something up, put some extra chemicals in that sh**t because it messed me up. I had chemical burns. I had issues and I didn’t know what it was.”

She said a doctor suggested another cause for the irritation, but she believes the pads were to blame, noting she had never been sensitive to scents or suffered urinary or yeast infections before.

Her post drew hundreds of comments, with many women saying they too had reactions to Always’ Flexfoam pads.

One wrote: “The whole area that the pad touched gave me a chemical burn after only a few hours. It was the Flexfoam.”

The original poster replied: “Mine was Flexfoam as well.”

While users did not specify exact product types, Always sells both day and night versions of its Infinity Pads with Flexfoam, which appear to be those mentioned.

Another commenter said: “Just a few days ago I was on my period using Always pads and I was f**king itching and it was burning. I never itch or have pain down there. I took the pad off so quick.”

A third wrote: “I switched to Honey Pot and had been fine. When my coworker gave me an Always pad, I was hesitant but used it — and got a chemical burn.”

Others described repeated irritation.

One said: “I use another brand for the first half of my period, then Always for the last two days, and I’ve had this burn for three months in a row. Stopped using them last month and no issue.”

Some also reported rashes or itching. One wrote: “In real time I am itching and getting a rash. I wore an Always pad earlier today.”

An Always spokesperson told the Daily Mail: “Our pads are used safely by millions of women every day around the world.

“Their safety is our top priority, and we carefully evaluate every component of our Always products to minimise the chances of skin irritation or allergic reactions.”

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Adolescent health

Listening to pain: What eight women taught me about the state of women’s health in the UK

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By Ruby Raut, founder & CEO, WUKA

It’s Ruby here, founder of WUKA and, like many of you, someone who’s been dismissed, doubted, and left waiting far too long when it comes to menstrual health.

Last week, I spoke at an event hosted by the Menstrual Health Project. It wasn’t just another panel or pitch session; it was a wake-up call.

The room was filled with GPs, pharmacists, educators, innovators, and women who have lived the daily reality of conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, PMDD, and premature ovarian insufficiency.

We weren’t there to celebrate solutions. We were there to listen. And what we heard broke us open.

The Stories Behind the Statistics

I walked out of that room with one page of notes — not data, not theory, but pain in ink.

The stories were raw and repetitive. Women told us of:

  • 14 years of seeking help and getting none.
  • 3 decades of living in pain.
  • Being laughed at for wanting to come off contraception.
  • Being told to “just go on the pill.”
  • Waiting for a laparoscopy since 2015, and still waiting in 2025.
  • Being asked to gain weight to get a period or lose weight to manage PCOS.
  • Being offered pregnancy as a “solution.”
  • Losing jobs because of endometriosis.

This is not an isolated list of frustrations. It’s a mirror reflecting the state of women’s health in the UK today.

Behind every statistic, there’s a woman who has rearranged her life around pain, missed promotions, cancelled plans, and lost trust in her own body.

The System Is Failing Us, and We Know It

Hearing these stories, I couldn’t help but think of it like a leaking roof.

You notice the drip, you report it, but you’re told it’s nothing serious, to just wait it out.

Days turn into months, months into years. By the time someone finally takes a proper look, the ceiling has collapsed.

That’s what living with an untreated women’s health condition feels like, small symptoms dismissed until they become impossible to ignore. That’s what our healthcare system is doing to women.

We don’t have a lack of data, we have a lack of listening.

When women describe pain, the system translates it into exaggeration. When they ask for options, they get the same recycled advice: “Go on the pill.”

The medical model still treats menstruation as a niche, not a vital sign.

And that’s why listening matters. Because until we treat lived experience as evidence, we’ll keep designing systems that ignore reality.

Learning from Lived Experience

As founders, practitioners, and advocates, we often talk about innovation, new tech, better diagnostics, smarter apps. But innovation without empathy is just noise.

Listening to eight women share their stories of endometriosis, PCOS, and PMDD reminded me of something fundamental: we can’t fix what we refuse to feel.

It takes courage to speak about periods, pain, infertility, and loss in a room full of professionals.

Yet these women did, not because they wanted sympathy, but because they wanted change.

Their words carried a collective message: “We don’t need to be fixed, we need to be heard.”

The Change We Need

So, what would change actually look like?

  1. Menstrual health education in medical schools.
    Not as a module, but as a mainstream subject. Every GP, nurse, and specialist should understand menstrual health the way they understand blood pressure.
  2. Inclusive menopause and menstrual support, for all ages, all bodies.
    Menstrual and menopausal health should not be separate conversations. Hormonal health spans a lifetime.
  3. Accessible care at every level.
    Support should start at the local pharmacy, not five years into a diagnosis journey. Pharmacists and primary care teams can be the first line of empathy and intervention.
  4. Private and public health insurance that covers menstrual conditions.
    No woman should have to choose between financial stability and pain management.
  5. Policy change that protects and respects women’s health.
    We need national recognition that menstrual health is not a luxury — it’s a basic human right.

What Listening Really Means

Listening is not passive. It’s radical.

It means staying in the discomfort of someone else’s pain long enough to see the system that caused it. It means asking, not assuming. It means holding space before we offer solutions.

The Menstrual Health Project event reminded me that we can’t rely on numbers alone. Data gives us proof. Stories give us purpose. And when you combine both, that’s when transformation begins.

Why WUKA Cares

At WUKA, we started with period underwear, but what we’re really building is period equity.

Every conversation, campaign, and product we create is rooted in one belief: women deserve better.

Better care. Better education. Better respect.

Because menstrual health is not a side issue. It’s a social justice issue. It’s about the right to live without shame, without silence, and without suffering that’s dismissed as “normal.”

If you’re someone living with any of this, endometriosis, PCOS, PMDD, or anything that makes you feel unseen, I see you. You are not alone. You deserve better, and we will keep fighting for you.

Let’s listen louder. Let’s care deeper. Let’s make menstrual health mainstream.

With you always,

Ruby x

Founder & CEO, WUKA

P.S. Check out the incredible work of the Menstrual Health Project. They’re not just raising awareness, they’re rebuilding the narrative.

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Cutting through the noise in femtech – key takeaways from Women’s Health Week 2025

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The flagship women’s health summit brought together over 400 visionary founders, funders and innovators, with a shared mission of transforming women’s health worldwide.

This year’s Women’s Health Week, which took place at the Barbican, London from 14-17 October, showcased a sector once considered by funders to be too much of a ‘niche’, meeting a crucial unmet need with huge market demand.

Investments are outperforming their value, regulators want to speed up the route to market, and clinical validation is cutting through the noise and demonstrating real results.

There is a buzz about the femtech sector – or at least there was in the Barbican last week – but experts have urged founders should move forward responsibility, building ethics and equity into their innovations.

Here’s our takeaways from the key conversations at Women’s Health Week.

1. Women’s health is outperforming – but angels and influencers are crucial for raising capital

Investment in women’s health is outperforming, and this trend is expected to continue, according to the panel at Women’s Health Week on Thursday 16th, where fund managers and founders highlighted significant returns, growing institutional interest, and the critical role of early-stage backers.

Sanji Chotai, a senior investment manager at British Business Bank, says she is seeing “really encouraging data” and anticipates more “outperformance”, particularly in medtech, which is drawing interest thanks to “shorter timelines to regulatory approval” and rapid commercialisation.

Series A and B activity is also picking up, but the panel agreed that early-stage capital and angel investors remain essential.

“My first angel investment in a women’s health company, I think on Series A, is going to be 20x on multiple and for our fund, it’s going to be around 9x,” said Trin Linamagi, founding partner at Sie Ventures.

“We need to take bigger bets and double down – and actually put the capital behind these businesses early on.”

Having driven successful campaigns for Soulcycle and Barry’s Bootcamp, Tatum Getty, now a founding general partner at THENA, also highlighted the importance of influencers – and not just on Instagram.

“Who is that person who believes in what we’re building and will tell their friends,” she said.

“Women have not been traditional investors they are more risk averse, smaller investment but bigger impact. They add so much more value than the amount of capital that they contribute.”

2. NICE and new pathways for health technologies

During a discussion on mastering Europe’s regulatory process, a representative from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) outlined how new rules-based approval routes, now being introduced for health technologies, are designed to speed access to innovation.

The body is also better aligning processes with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to reduce the time it takes to regulatory approval.

“We’re taking forward the rules-based pathway for health tech,” said Kendall Gilmore, a senior advisor at NICE.

“Developing a model more similar to the medicines pathway, where, for some products, it goes through the MHRA, through NICE and then comes with a recommendation that has a funding mandate attached.”

The pathway, currently being developed will see health technologies assessed in a similar way to medicines with the first products approved from April next year.

NICE currently evaluates only a fraction of the 500,000 technologies used daily in the NHS. While a NICE recommendation is “not mandatory”, it can be a “powerful signal” to the NHS.

NICE is constantly “horizon scanning” for “disruptive products” further down the pipeline and is engaging more directly with innovators, industry associations and international partners to identify promising technologies earlier, and a new early value assessment route is giving promising products a faster track.

“If it meets an unmet need, it should be used with further evidence generation,” Gilmore explained.

“This is particularly relevant for digital health and diagnostics.”

3. Scientific validation is the most effective way to ‘cut through the noise’ 

In a panel exploring how to “cut through the noise” in femtech, founders were urged to bake credibility into product design from day one, with scientific proof and clinical validation the sharpest differentiator, according to Soun Rakshit, of MV Health.

“You have to spend probably two years going through the R&D process,” said Rakshit.

“That is the best and probably the only way to do it, so that by the time you get regulatory approval, you have already had significant patient feedback and iteration.”

Earning trust also means collaborating with experts who understand the problem, as Helen O’Neil, founder of Hertility, explained.

When in the development stage, O’Neil reached out to professionals, including obstetricians and gynaecologists to understand the right questions to ask based on their “clinical intuition and personal experience”.

Rakshit added: “If we can show true clinical evidence, and it does take time, it is the best way to cut through the noise.”

4. Bias in AI is ‘real and harmful’ – and founders need to know how to address it

Experts discussed the role of AI and its potential to both help and harm women’s health, urging proactive testing and human oversight to avoid the risk of decades of a “male default model” being implemented into new solutions.

“AI that’s trained on that skewed data can really fail women,” said Sarah Montgomery Taylor, clinical lead of GenAI evaluation and scaled services at Google, highlighting familiar examples such as heart-attack presentation.

“Biases are real, and they are really harmful, and so being aware of them is so crucial.”

Panellists also flagged “measurement bias” and the “historical dismissal of women’s pain,” where systems trained on those records “can learn to deprioritise” certain signals.

Beyond bias in diagnostics, Marinos Ionnides, head of software and AI medical devices regulation at the MHRA, highlighted the risks of implementing AI in areas where there may be hidden bias.

“I’m quite worried about the deployment of software AI in places where we aren’t we didn’t know we would be finding bias [such as] appointment booking,” he said, adding that in these “unknown unknowns,” “the regulator has their greatest role”.

Founders were urged to be responsible when scaling AI, introducing guardrails such as building in equity and collecting data from the very beginning for “rigorous real-world validation”.

Clinicians need to be able to test the product and understand it to build trust, while regulatory processes should be “adaptive”, offering “clarity on what the path is to market”.

Chen Davies, founder at Anya, shared a real-world example of how products and content tailored for underserved groups drove measurable change, including a “10% population-wise” rise in breastfeeding rates in a deprived area of Blackpool after six months.

“AI should gradually complement human support without replacing it,” said Davies.

5. Consumer data can play a critical role in building the clinical evidence-base 

During the final panel, participants argued that continuous real-world data, paired with clinical benchmarks, is the fastest way to fix women’s health’s “male baseline” problem and turn lived experience into evidence.

Dr Chris Curry, clinical director for women’s health at Oura, argued that wearables are “one of the big unlocks” by collecting data that gives the “whole picture of the human”.

But tracking can – should – meet clinical standards, with the panel pushing for globally representative consumer datasets.

“I see consumer data if it’s truly representative, if it’s truly globally representative, being critical,” said Micah Gellman, a senior strategist for women’s health innovation at the Gates Foundation.

“It helps us calibrate and link consumer insights and lived experience to clinical anchors and value outcomes… this kind of consumer data is one avenue that we have to really change investor appetite.”

Rhiannon White, CEO of Clue, which has a long-running research collaboration with Oura, including collecting symptom tracking data on perimenopause and pain, added that women’s spending power can actually steer where future R&D should be focused.

“We are able to shape and direct where people will put their research and put their development with our spending power,” she said.

6. The crisis in government support can be an opportunity for more innovative funding pathways 

With the Gates Foundation recently committing an additional US$2.5bn for research in women’s health, Gellman also reframed the reduction in government funding for women’s health – such as that seen under the Trump administration in the US – as an opportunity for more innovate financing.

“There is a real opportunity for European and Asian government funding to step up and fill some of those gaps,” said Gellman.

“An opportunity for government funding and philanthropic funding to take new forms and to be partnering in new ways to catalyse innovation and to work with academics and industry players.”

Rather than a binary between grants and VC, the panel highlighted “blended financing mechanisms, venture philanthropy… different kinds of outcome-based financing” with public and philanthropic dollars used “to de risk, early-stage investment”.

Gellman added: “This crisis that we’re in, in terms of government funding is also an opportunity for innovative financing.”

The comments brought the conference full circle, reminiscent of those made earlier in the day, by Tatum Getty, who highlighted: “Women and small amounts of capital, can make a big difference.”

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