Understanding Your Menstrual Cycle: Why It Matters, How It Works, and Why You Should Care

 Your menstrual cycle is incredibly important for your overall health and for your best chance at a successful pregnancy. Creating a high-tech uterine lining each month that you will either continue to develop through a pregnancy or you'll eliminate if pregnancy isn't on the menu, is a biologically intensive and complex process. And there are a select few among all placental mammals who run this process the way humans do. Scientists estimate that less than 2% of placental mammals menstruate the way we do. Something like 84 species out of more than 5,000. All the primate species are relatively closely related, and we menstruate in a similar way, but there's also unexpected attendance at this intimate gathering of placental mammals that menstruate like us, including the spiny mouse, some species of bat, and the elephant shrew. This week's topic is focused on why we essentially organize so many bodily functions around the way that we have a menstrual cycle, how on God's green earth we do it, and what information we can glean from keeping track of cycle to cycle variation.