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Welcome to As A Woman, the podcast hosted by fertility physician Dr. Natalie Crawford to educate and empower women.

Each week learn about your health, your fertility, and how they relate to your true self.

Become a part of the community fostering collaboration over competition while learning how to authentically find your voice and amplify others as a woman.

Hi friends, welcome back to the As A Woman podcast. I'm so excited to have you here.

And today I want to do a quick episode on some latest research about the COVID vaccine in your period.

This has been all over social media. I've done a couple of YouTube videos about it.

But I really thought that this was something that warranted an episode here just so that we can all be on the same page.

The first thing to understand is that the menstrual cycle is very complex. We consider your period to be your vital sign, meaning when everything is functioning perfect in your body,

you should have regular predictable periods of about the same length and about the same amount of bleeding.

And when things start to change, that can often be a sign that something is not right.

Now it's important to understand that a lot of components go to your period. So briefly, let's think about what happens in a normal cycle.

Inside your ovary, I like to imagine there is a vault or all your eggs are kept. At the beginning of a month, a group of eggs comes out of that vault, each egg grows inside a follicle.

The brain sends out follicle-stimulating hormone or FSH. FSH is a well-named hormone that works by stimulating one follicle to grow.

As that follicle grows, the egg makes estrogen. Estrogen reports back to the brain and the pituitary gland sends out LH or luteinizing hormone.

This surge allows ovulation to take place and then pulses throughout the luteal phase supporting the corpus luteum and making progesterone.

If a pregnancy occurs, the pregnancy starts to circuit HCG or the pregnancy hormone and this rescues the corpus luteum.

Incidentally, the corpus luteum is only going to live for approximately two weeks unless it gets rescued by HCG.

So in a month when there is no pregnancy, the corpus luteum does not last longer than 14 days.

It starts to die, your progesterone levels drop and then this withdrawal from progesterone allows your body to have a bleed or what we call a period and this process starts over and over again.

At the uterine level, estrogen grows aligning, progesterone stabilizes the lining and then withdrawal from progesterone allows a period.

So many things can mess this process up, meaning abnormalities of your thyroid gland or your pituitary gland, PCOS being overweight, being stressed out, not eating enough, working out too much, chronic illness, severe illness, inflammation, autoimmune disease,

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