Your menstrual cycle is the engine of reproduction and a window into your overall health. 

It's critical both for a successful pregnancy, and can tell us things about your endocrine, metabolic, immune, and cardiac systems. 

We have tended to look at things like how heavy or light the flow of your period is, or the length of the cycle as signs of wellness or distress in your system. But some researchers, like the one I speak with today, are trying to mine different aspects of the cycle for information about overall health. 

What Dr. Gombert-Labedens  and her colleagues are looking at is menstrual cycle linked temperature patterns, which change systemically with age and are surprisingly consistent within each person, so that they may be useful to track aging and detect deviations from a person's usual physiological state. We'll talk today about the state of this research and where it may be going

Using activity trackers in pregnancy, conversation with Dr. Benjamin Smarr (part I): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-an-activity-tracker-tell-you-if-you-are-pregnant/id1779600854?i=1000719761885

Science Advances paper: Identifying Menstrual Metrics as Personal Health Markers: Age Trends and individual footprints in temperature across 5675 cycles: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb1175