Menstrual Blood: From Stigma to Women’s Health Breakthrough

Approximately two billion people globally menstruate monthly, releasing roughly six tablespoons of menstrual blood over three to seven days each cycle. This biological material—dismissed and discarded without a second thought—contains information that could reshape how women’s health is understood and treated. Menstrual blood differs fundamentally from blood drawn in typical medical tests. Beyond blood cells, it contains uterine tissue lining, vaginal secretions, cervical mucus, and stem cells. Research has identified over 1,000 distinct proteins in menstrual fluid, with 385 of those proteins appearing nowhere else in the human body.

Gemma Sharp, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Exeter, directs research into menstrual health through the Menarche Menstruation Menopause and Mental Health Consortium. Her team is building a menstrual fluid biobank to understand heavy menstrual bleeding and develop better treatments. Sharp emphasizes the scale of the opportunity: “There’s just this huge clinical gap because we haven’t been doing this type of research before.”

Why Menstrual Health Has Been Sidelined

Decades of Medical Bias

Healthcare’s foundational bias toward male physiology is one factor. Women were systematically excluded from clinical trials until 1993, when the National Institute of Health’s Revitalization Act mandated their inclusion in federally-funded studies. This means serious research into how treatments and diseases affect women has only been happening for roughly three decades. The backlog is enormous.

Knowledge Gaps in Medicine

Knowledge gaps extend into medicine itself. Ridhi Tariyal, co-founder of NextGen Jane—an Oakland-based women’s health company collecting health data via menstrual blood samples—discovered this firsthand. When pitching to a male oncologist, she found herself explaining fundamental menstrual facts. His surprise at learning that tampons are changed every few hours highlighted a striking gap in medical education.

Cultural Stigma and Silence

Cultural stigma compounds the problem. Christine Metz, head of medicinal biochemistry at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, points out that menstrual blood has carried social disgrace for centuries: “It has always had a social stigma. I don’t know of any culture other than the indigenous population that embraces menstrual blood. Everyone else says, ‘we don’t talk about that stuff.'” This shame has permeated popular culture for decades. Television gradually incorporated menstruation into storylines, typically as a marker of leaving childhood or as comedic fodder. The word “period” itself wasn’t spoken on television until a 1980s Tampax commercial.

Momentum for Cultural Change

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Recent years have brought visible cultural shifts. Television shows like Broad City normalized period conversations. Pixar’s Turning Red made menstruation central to its narrative. Period products have evolved dramatically with brands like Thinx, Looni, and Cora offering alternatives to traditional tampons and pads. The notion of free bleeding in public spaces would have been unimaginable a generation ago. While stigma persists and gaps remain in menstrual education worldwide, the cultural shift has opened space for scientific conversation. “We study spit, we study poop, we study urine,” Metz observes. “Nobody’s studying menstrual blood.” That is beginning to change.

From Crime Scenes to Diagnostics

The Forensic Origin Story

The pivot toward menstrual blood’s medical potential has an unexpected origin. In 2012, forensic scientists at New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, including Donald Siegel, were trying to establish whether blood at crime scenes was menstrual or from violent incidents. The “menstrual blood defense”—a claim that bloodstains came from menstruation rather than crime—was a recurring legal challenge. Those early studies identified the 385 unique proteins distinguishing menstrual blood from systemic blood, opening a diagnostic door.

FDA-Approved Products Enter the Market

Qvin, a California-based health tech company founded in 2014 by Dr. Sara Naseri and Soren Therkelsen, commercialized the first menstrual blood diagnostic: a pad called the Q-pad with a removable collection strip. In 2024, the FDA approved the Q-pad for measuring hemoglobin A1C levels to track blood sugar in diabetes patients. The company has since pivoted toward HPV testing, which typically requires uncomfortable in-person evaluation with a speculum. Qvin’s HPV diagnostic pads already received approval from Thailand’s Food and Drug Administration.

Companies Leading the Research

NextGen Jane is developing tampon-based testing for home use. Tariyal’s company has completed endometriosis research and is enrolling participants in infertility and autoimmune disorder studies, recognizing that menstruation itself is an inflammatory process.

Xella Health, led by CEO Kelly Lacob, frames menstrual diagnostics as “precision healthcare” and “concierge care delivery for women.” The telehealth company plans to add menstrual blood testing via swab-based collection as an add-on to traditional blood draws. Xella membership costs $499 annually for standard coverage or $949 for management of active conditions. Lacob explains the diagnostic advantage: “Whenever you’re trying to look at a particular system, the closer you get to the source, you’re going to see things sooner and in higher concentrations.”

Endometriosis: The Priority Condition

Over 6 million women in the United States have endometriosis, causing painful periods, cramping, fatigue, and often fertility challenges. Yet there is no non-invasive test. Women frequently wait decades for diagnosis. The only medically accepted method is surgical—a laparoscopic procedure detecting only 70 percent of cases.

The ROSE (Research Outsmarts Endometriosis) study, launched in 2013 by Metz and geneticist Peter Gregerson, MD, aimed to change this. Nearly 4,000 participants have enrolled in the biobank research. A major finding emerged: cells in menstrual blood express inflammatory biomarkers predictive of endometriosis. The National Institutes of Health awarded $850,000 to the ROSE study this year.

The research revealed that silicon menstrual cups provide the most effective collection method. “Collecting it with an absorptive product kills the tissues and cells and interferes with our processing,” Metz explains. A teaspoon during peak flow is required, ruling out swab collection for this particular research.

Research Expanding Into Systemic Conditions

The menstrual blood research landscape extends beyond endometriosis. Endogene.bio at Barcelona’s Hospital Clinic, ETH Zurich (with a diagnostic pad in early clinical testing), and MIT’s Fairbairn Menstruation Science Fund are all pursuing diagnostic applications for cancer, endometriosis, and systemic inflammatory diseases. The common thread: menstrual blood provides a window into reproductive health and potentially broader women’s health patterns that traditional diagnostics have missed for generations.

Source: Allure