Menstrual Blood Is Having a Moment
When it comes to medical diagnoses and health markers, period blood is something of a superpower. We should leverage it.
I was 11 when I got my first period.
I’d heard about it at school during a “special class” (my friends and I were horrified) and my mother had told me about it, of course. She had pulled me onto a bench outside a pub on the way home from school one day to tell me what to expect. I spent the whole conversation cringing and we didn’t discuss it again. This brief conversation did little to assuage the deep shame I felt when the first drops of blood came.
Instead of announcing the news to my mum, I kept it to myself, and managed the situation over the next 10 months by stealing sanitary pads (from family members, not stores!)—anything to avoid uttering the words out loud: I got my period.
It seems somehow tragic and unnecessary to me now—why didn’t I just say something? After all, this was the ‘90s; hardly Victorian England. But in retrospect it’s clear my response was simply a reflection of the way periods are treated in society—like dirty, embarrassing secrets.
A 2021 report from Always (the sanitary pad brand from Procter & Gamble) revealed that one in three young people in the U.S. have experienced period shaming: i.e. have received negative comments about their menstruation. Another study published in 2022 found that across countries from the U.S. to Senegal to India to Kenya the stigma around periods had been a key challenge in meeting women’s menstrual needs.
It’s 2025. Are we seriously still having this conversation? Well, yes, but hold on, because there’s some good news too.
Menstrual blood is actually having a bit of a moment.
It’s not just that we’re getting more comfortable with the idea of periods overall—finally depicting ‘blood’ as red instead of blue in sanitary product ads for example—but experts are finally taking note of period blood as a diagnostic superpower.
Packed with biomarkers (molecules found in the body that are a sign of a normal or abnormal process, or of a condition or disease), menstrual blood, can give doctors a good picture of an individual's health. Period blood has the potential to transform how women’s conditions are diagnosed and how they are treated—conditions which have traditionally been overlooked, sidelined and not treated at all.
Thanks to the stem cells also present, period blood is also emerging as a key player in the advancement of regenerative medicine which could benefit everyone—not just those who menstruate.
A Diagnostic Tool
Period blood is not just blood. Menstrual effluent, to call it by its proper name, contains endometrial tissue, proteins, hormones and stem cells. It has hundreds of different biomarkers which can give an indication of health when studied. And applications are plentiful.
For example, period blood can be used as an alternative to Pap smear tests in screening for high risk HPV—often a precursor to cervical cancer. Our bodies naturally shed the same cells we painfully have scraped out of us during a Pap; why has it taken this long to figure out there might be an alternative way?
Beyond HPV, period blood can also tell us about the health of the thyroid, diabetes, anemia, ovarian reserve and perimenopause hormones.
Much of this research has been spearheaded by Dr. Sarah Naseri, the founder of a company called Qvin. Qvin’s “Q-Pad”—a menstrual pad with a removable strip that collects menstrual blood—is designed to test for critical healthcare information; just like a traditional blood test but less invasive, from home and without the “sharp scratch” of needles.
Qvin was granted clearance in 2024 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to use its Q-Pad to test blood sugar levels as a replacement for the HBA1c test, which assesses blood sugar levels and helps to diagnose and manage Type 2 diabetes.
It has also received clearance in Thailand to test for HPV. And Dr. Nasari has plans to roll out the Q-Pad for use across the full range of health conditions for which menstrual blood provides evidence.
Stem cells were first identified in menstrual blood in 2007 but are still not widely used in clinical applications. It matters, because the applications could be used for the treatment of certain cancers, immune deficiencies and genetic disorders.
Hannah Manley, a recent Ph.D. graduate and lecturer at Nottingham Trent University focused her study on the collection of menstrual blood stem cells, finding that they can be extracted from samples donated on tampons and pads, as well as menstrual cups.
“It makes sense that there are stem cells in menstrual blood, the uterus undergoes cyclical deterioration, shedding and rebuilding—we should have known about this a long time ago,” she says.
“Regenerative medicine is so exciting but the research is so expensive,” she explains. “You could take away a lot of that cost by not requiring invasive procedures to collect the cells. Menstrual blood could blow it all wide open—a resource which is almost endless.”
Manley experienced challenges in getting her research approved and proving its value to university decision makers, or as she puts it, “the men in power,” something she believes is down to the taboo around periods.
‘That’s Disgusting’ (No, It’s Not.)
When Karli Büchling was 22, she asked her doctor, who was about to take a blood sample from her vein, if she could use period blood instead. It was her time of the month, she rationalized, and she was already bleeding. The (female!) doctor responded with, “that’s disgusting.”
Fast forward 15 years and Büchling is about to launch Europe’s first menstrual blood bank, ROOY& Biobank, in a bid to accelerate research and encourage collaboration between researchers and founders in women’s health.
“Menstrual blood has less than 400 studies published on it, while sperm has over 15,000,” she says. “Even when you look at the 400 done they are inconsistent—there is no standardization around how and when the samples are collected. Our biobank will be able to show ethnicity, age, what time of cycle it was collected etc. so that we can compare results accurately.”
Büchling, who is working with the University of Warwick, hopes to have the biobank up and running by the end of the year. But she has experienced challenges in pushing the idea forward—and it almost always comes down to stigma. “Firstly, there's a lot of red tape specifically around collecting menstrual blood because it hasn’t been done before at scale,” she explains.
“But when you dig into that and work through the questions, you see that people seem to think women won’t want to donate, that it’s gross. I’m like, ‘50 million people have period blood on their hands every day. They wash it, they make food for their families, they go to work. You’re acting like it’s worse than feces.’”
Leah Hazard, a midwife and the author of “Womb,” calls it the “yuck factor.”
“The idea which has been persistent over millennia in cultures across the world, is that periods are in some way dirty, taboo, dangerous, even evil,” she says. “Unfortunately medicine and its funding bodies are still largely controlled by men. There hasn’t been the appreciation that not only is this substance not disgusting, it’s of some considerable worth.”
This idea hews closely to the pushback Manley and Büchling experienced around collection. “I had real difficulty in getting permission to collect and was asked very odd questions around things like hand washing,” Manley says. “I think it was sheer terror of menstrual blood and it being considered dirty or problematic.”
‘There’s So Much We Can Do’
Endometriosis affects 10% of women globally according to the World Health Organization. As it currently stands, it takes an average of four to 11 years to get an endometriosis diagnosis. If doctors used menstrual blood samples, diagnosis could be achieved with one simple test. This is within our grasp. And that’s just one disease.
“Imagine debilitating pain being diagnosed as endometriosis within weeks of giving a menstrual blood sample, imagine eliminating smear tests completely, imagine better drug allocations for women based on their period cycles,” says Büchling. “There’s so much we can do with further research. It’s life changing.”
These kinds of issues aren’t rare or unusual. In fact, they’re staggeringly common. Around 190 million women suffer from endometriosis. In the U.K. alone, over half a million women are stuck on waiting lists for gynecology hospital care.
The delays in diagnosis aren’t limited to “female” diseases such as endometriosis. According to a Danish study, women are diagnosed later than men across 700 diseases. That’s half of the global population at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing medical treatment—something that could be addressed if we understood (and listened to) the female body more.
“I’ve had a pretty [bad] time with my gynecological health,” says Hazard, the midwife and author. But if we can leverage our knowledge for quicker diagnosis, less invasive investigations and otherwise empower women to approach their health in an individualized way, “that would make me really happy,” she says.
As for shifting the focus away from shame, Manley hopes her research and that of others will start to change the narrative around period blood. “I think it’s really valuable in overcoming the menstrual taboo,” she says. “We have a reason to celebrate it; and a reason to love and honor our cycles.”
If only my 11-year-old self could hear that now.
Luba Kassova
Emma Haslett
Ruchika T. Malhotra
