The lack of research on menstrual cups

Menstrual cups are marketed as a cheap, safe, and environmentally friendly alternative to tampons and are growing in popularity. The Open Source Period project was born when a study about menstrual cups hit the news in April 2018. To cut a long story short, a lab-based study suggested that menstrual cups users may be at a higher risk than tampon users of getting the potentially fatal toxic shock syndrome. If you are interested in the nitty gritty of what that study showed and what it might mean for menstrual cups users, Siouxsie wrote about it here, here, and here.

The study sent Siouxsie on a hunt for any other studies that looked at the safety of menstrual cups and what she found was a bit alarming. There are hardly any. The one study that’s most often used as evidence that menstrual cups are safe followed 604 menstruating teens for about a year and didn’t see a single case of toxic shock. That’s good news, right? Maybe not. If the rates of toxic shock are the same in menstrual cup users as it is in tampon-users, the researchers would have needed 25,000 people in the trial to have a chance of seeing just one case of toxic shock!

Here at the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab we’re collaborating with My Cup and Yvette Wharton from the Centre for eResearch at the University of Auckland. We want to help build a community of interested researchers, menstrual cup users, social enterprises, and governmental and non-governmental organisations from around the world, that are keen to understand more about the safety of menstrual cups and how they impact on people’s health and well-being. Our vision is to work together to figure out what the big unanswered questions about menstrual cups are, and then find a way to carry out the studies needed to answer those questions in an inclusive, culturally-appropriate way, that doesn’t ignore and exploit indigenous and under-represented communities. This project is open for anyone to be involved so please get in touch if you are curious to know more or want to join us. This project currently has no funding.