Understanding and Addressing Menstrual Pain in Adolescents and Young Adults: An Examination of Help-Seeking and a Mindfulness-Based Intervention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dysmenorrhea, defined as painful menstruation, impacts the majority of menstruating adolescents and can significantly impair wellbeing and daily functioning. Although prevalent, little is known about the experiences adolescents have seeking treatment for menstrual pain or their preferences for treatment. Accordingly, Study 1 addressed this gap by examining the retrospective experiences of Canadian young adults aged 18 to 25 who sought help from healthcare providers for menstrual pain during adolescence. Participants completed an online, mixed-methods survey about their help-seeking experiences, which were analyzed using descriptive statistics and reflexive thematic analysis. Findings (N = 590, Mage = 21.78 years) revealed that 41% sought treatment for menstrual pain during adolescence and of these 43% found the treatments they were offered ineffective. Three themes were generated related to why treatment was perceived as unsuitable: (1) Side effects and risks of pharmacological treatment, (2) treatment not tailored to the individual, and (3) treatment seen as a band-aid solution. Participants proposed improvements to treatment seeking which were reflected in four generated themes: (1) Go beyond contraceptives, (2) share and demonstrate expertise, (3) investigate menstrual pain, and (4) listen and do not dismiss. Notably, participants expressed interest in trying nonpharmacological interventions, including mindfulness-based interventions. In response to the need for more effective adolescent menstrual pain interventions, paired with the expressed interest in trying nonpharmacological interventions during adolescence, the feasibility, acceptability, satisfaction, and preliminary efficacy of a mindfulness-based intervention for adolescent menstrual pain was examined in Study 2. The initial aim was to recruit 14- to 18-year- olds with menstrual pain; however, due to challenges with recruitment the age criteria were expanded up to 19 years of age. Participants completed self-report measures (e.g., menstrual characteristics, dysmenorrhea symptom severity and interference, mindfulness skills) at baseline, postintervention, and at 3-month follow-up. Eight young adults completed the intervention across two separate groups (group 1, n = 4; group 2, n = 4). The intervention was feasibly implemented, and participants were highly satisfied secondary outcome measures from pre- to post-intervention were not statistically significant. Participants provided feedback to inform future iterations of the group. This intervention provided preliminary evidence that mindfulness approaches are feasible, acceptable, and satisfactory to among 17- to 19-year-olds with menstrual pain, with further research required to better understand these areas in younger adolescents. Collectively, these studies highlight a misalignment between current dysmenorrhea treatment approaches and the needs of adolescents, as well as broader pain management guidelines, highlighting the importance of psychosocial dimensions. This dissertation adds support to the existing view that reconceptualizing dysmenorrhea management through a biopsychosocial lens may address shortcomings in dysmenorrhea care and result in improved outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".