Menstrual health and endometriosis: costs incurred by women, health systems and society

Manjulaa Narasimhan, Jennifer Rasanathan, Michelle Remme, Caitlin E. Kennedy, Maclaine Barré-Quick, Pascale Allotey, Goodness Ogeyi Odey, Sergio Torres‐Rueda
In: npj Women's Health · 2025 · vol. 3(1) · doi:10.1038/s44294-025-00094-8 · W4414621569
article OA: diamond CC0 ⤵ 1 in-corpus citation
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⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This paper highlights the financial burdens of menstrual health and endometriosis on women, health systems, and society to emphasize neglected women's health needs and advocate for interventions.

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⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This paper is a perspective that synthesizes evidence from a rapid, semi-systematic review on the economic costs of women’s gynaecological health, focusing specifically on menstrual health and endometriosis, using peer-reviewed English-language PubMed articles (2000 to 13 Nov 2023) plus additional references. The authors highlight multiple cost categories, including women’s out-of-pocket spending (e.g., menstrual products and pain management), health-system treatment costs (e.g., for endometriosis), and broader opportunity costs to society such as productivity losses from absenteeism, while noting that much of the economic evidence and cost-effectiveness work is underdeveloped and geography/availability limitations arise from the selected search and review process. For menstrual health, they summarize prevalence of dysmenorrhoea and evidence on product affordability and period poverty, including cross-country price variability and tax and rural “premium” effects. Relevance to endometriosis: the paper is centrally about endometriosis costs within a broader menstrual health and gynaecological health economic framework, explicitly addressing direct treatment costs and linking poor gynaecological health to downstream harms in endometriosis-related care.

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Abstract

Sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) are central to overall health and well-being. Advancing women’s gynaecological health is an aspect of SRHR that has been inadequately prioritized. We highlight the costs incurred by women, health systems and societies associated with menstrual health and endometriosis to underscore critical unmet women’s health needs and call for interventions to mitigate society-wide economic repercussions of poor gynaecological health in women.

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Condition tags

endometriosis

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

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last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
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