Female athletes have faster reaction times and make fewer errors when they have their period – even though they feel their performance suffers compared to other phases of their menstrual cycle, new research suggests. The study of more than 200 athletes, led by researchers at University College London, sought to understand why injury rates are in female athletes than their male counterparts. As the popularity of women's sports has skyrocketed, , leading to much debate over the potential reasons.
Hormones are an obvious difference between people who have a menstrual cycle and those who don't or who are using hormonal contraception. What effect those hormones have as they rise and fall across the menstrual cycle isn't clear, although research points to that could reasonably affect an athlete's performance – or perhaps make them . While neuroscientists have been curious about these , sports scientists have hardly probed how the brain function of professional sportspeople is boosted or impeded by the changing hormones and how this fluctuation impacts injury risk.
"Changes in spatial cognition could, in theory, be a contributing risk factor for injury, especially in fast-paced sports that require precise, millisecond accuracy in interactions with moving objects," Flaminia Ronca, a sports scientist at University College London, and colleagues . Female athletes, for example, often around ovulation or that their performance worsens in the latter part of their menstrual cycle, the .