PMS Guide |

Premenstrual syndrome has not been a completely ignored condition. Researchers have tackled PMS from many angles. They have analyzed symptoms and searched for a cause, but their conclusions have been so varied that doctors have been left to scratch their heads and ponder what truth might be. Physicians have even looked with skepticism on the efforts of Dr. Katharina Dalton, one of the first doctors to recognize that a wide variety of symptoms might belong to one premenstrual condition.

Dr. Dalton is a British physician who in 1953 published the first paper in British medical medical literature on PMS. She wrote the paper with Dr. Raymond Greene, a noted endocrinologist who had also been working on premenstrual syndrome at the time. Drs. Dalton and Greene are credited with having created the term “premenstrual syndrome.”

Dr. Dalton’s experiences with her own period led her to suspect that premenstrual changes had far-ranging effects. She herself got a splitting migraine headache each month before here period. In 1953, when she was called in on the case of a woman who had asthmatic seizures each just before she menstruated. Dr. Dalton started to consider linking different symptoms with the premenstrual condition. Another case of asthma turned up, followed by a woman with a monthly migraine. Drs. Dalton and Greene interviewed 87 sufferers in order to write their first paper, and the rest, as they say , is medical history.