International Journal of

Background: Understanding the prevalence of menstrual disorders has important implications for both health service planning and risk factor epidemiology.
Objective: The aim of this review is to identify and collate studies describing the prevalence of menstrual disorders in Iran.
Materials and Methods: Studies with original data related to the prevalence of menstrual disorders were identified via searching six electronic databases and reviewing citations. All abstracts or titles found by the electronic searches were independently scrutinized by two reviewers. The Meta-analysis was performed with a random effects model, considering the remarkable heterogeneity among studies. A total of 35 eligible epidemiological studies were included in this review.
Results: Overall, the pooled prevalence of primary dysmenorrhea was 73.27% (95% CI=65.12-81.42). The mean proportion of women with oligomenorrhea was 13.11% (95.5%, 95% CI: 10.04-16.19). We identified 16 studies that reported polymenorrhoea with a random effect of pooled prevalence estimate of 9.94% (95% CI 7.33%-12.56%). The prevalence estimate of hypermenorrhea was 12.94% (95% CI 9.31%-16.57%). Overall prevalence of hypomenorrhea was 5.25% (95% CI 3.20%-7.30%), ranging from 0.9- 12.90%. Pooling six studies that reported estimates for menorrhagia, the overall prevalence was 19.24% (95% CI 12.78-25.69). Overall, 6.04% (95% CI: 1.99-10.08) of the women were shown to have metrorrhagia.
Conclusion: This systematic review suggests that the average prevalence of menstrual disorders in Iran is substantial. It has been neglected as a fundamental problem of women's reproductive health. Diagnosis and treatment of these disorders should be included in the primary health care system of reproductive health.
 

Background: Research examining the role of vitamin D deficiency and the development of menstrual disorders in women is of widespread interest. Studies have been published showing that supplementation with high-dose vitamin D can lead to the restoration of the menstrual cycle. We lack adequate information regarding the effect of vitamin D levels on the physiology of menstruation and further on fertility in women of reproductive age due to the contradictory results reported by studies.
Objective: To study the association of 25-hydroxy vitamin D with menstrual cycle characteristics including long and short cycle length and cycle irregularity.
Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, serum vitamin D level of 166 women attending an outpatient department with menstrual irregularities after excluding all obvious causes of menstrual disorders (n = 83) between April-June 2019 were measured and were compared with women of similar profiles with complaints other than menstrual irregularities (n = 83).
Results: A decreased level of vitamin D was associated with a 13.3 times odds of an irregular cycle (OR (95% CI): 13.30 (5.79-30.60), p < 0.001). 25-hydroxy vitamin D was not associated with age or body mass index. We found a significant difference (p < 0.001) in mean vitamin D levels among the females with irregular cycles vs. regular cycles.
Conclusion: Vitamin D plays a role in the physiology of reproduction specific to the menstrual cycle and ovulation. Long-term prospective studies assessing the exact cutoff value and the exact dose of supplementation required are needed.