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From: mnl@ukc.ac.uk (M.N.Leonard)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Women's periods in synch
Message-ID: <7298@harrier.ukc.ac.uk>
Date: 17 Apr 91 09:25:49 GMT
References: <1991Apr16.013511.10385@agate.berkeley.edu> <1991Apr16.014518.11307@agate.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: mnl@ukc.ac.uk (M.N.Leonard)
Organization: Computing Lab, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.
Lines: 26

In article <1991Apr16.014518.11307@agate.berkeley.edu> samdavis@maelstrom.Berkeley.EDU (Benjamin Davis) writes:
>In _The_Straight_Dope_, Cecil Adams explains that the reason women's periods
>fall into sync is because of chemicals from their sweat: it seems that some
>women are "dominant" in that their sweat causes other women's cycles to fall
>in with theirs, and other women are more susceptible to suggestion from the
>chemicals around them (I think these chemicals are pheromones?).  So if
>women live together or work together for extended periods (no pun intended)
>of time, their menstrual cycles will go in sync.

I agree with the idea that pheromones secreted within a group of women
living or working together can induce menstrual synchronism but it
gets rather more complex if one or more of the women are taking oral
contraceptives, in this case no amount of exposure to other peoples
pheromones will alter the menstrual cycle. I recall reading a paper
in the dim distant past recording menstrual synchronicity however, the
authors took great care to measure the results from women who were in
an enclosed environment such as prison inmates. I think that if a
group of normal women living together (presumably some of which were
taking "the pill"), there would almost certainly be no synchronisation
of menstruation as each of these women would be secreting the
pheremone's appropiate to the stage of their cycle so no "pheromonal
pull" would exist to alter any womans given cycle.
  
Any Comments

Mike Leonard