It is finally time to talk about the impact of fluctuating hormones

The first rule of hormones was always that you don’t talk about your hormones. For decades, women have often felt the need to minimise or hide the impact that fluctuating levels of female sex hormones can have. The shifts in oestrogen levels experienced by many can be as profound as they are frequent – fluctuating monthly and also changing dramatically during puberty, pregnancy and menopause.

These hormonal ups and downs don’t just have a personal impact, but are also a nuisance for medical research, where it was long common to exclude women from studies to prevent their hormones from muddying the results.

One consequence of this exclusion was the view of ADHD as a male condition, particularly one involving hyperactive young boys. We now know that girls are just as likely as boys to have ADHD, but their symptoms can be harder to spot. Women who slipped under the radar as children are only now realising that they have the condition and seeking treatment.

Here again, hormones play a role, as scientists uncover what many women with ADHD already feel: that hormonal fluctuations and shifts can profoundly affect ADHD symptoms, sometimes undermining treatments and pushing their coping techniques to breaking point.

Hormonal fluctuations and shifts can profoundly affect ADHD symptoms and treatments

The hope, of course, is that a better understanding of how sex hormones affect brain function will lead to better treatments, but as we report, this work also gives women with ADHD a powerful self-understanding, finally allowing them to predict and work around changes in attention and motivation.

Yet how will those who most need to know ever find out? Mercifully, the taboo on talking about hormones has now been smashed, a surprisingly positive outcome of social media’s obsession with female health and wellness. What once felt unmentionable is now far from it, with hormone changes, menstrual phases and associated symptoms now commonly discussed online. The challenge is to use these conversations for progress and resist reverting back to old stereotypes.