Scientists find first rodent with a menstrual cycle

While mice have been great stand-ins for humans in medical research, they haven’t been such good models for women’s health research due to the lack of a menstrual cycle.

But now, according to a new study, researchers have discovered one particular mouse that does have a menstrual cycle, which provides a tantalizing research prospect.

“When you do science you’re not surprised at anything — but wow, this was a really interesting finding,” Francesco DeMayo, a reproductive biologist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who was not involved in the work, told Nature News.

Tiny menstrual cycles allow for huge research

According to the study, scientists discovered the spiny mouse (Acomys cahirinus) averaged a 9-day menstrual cycle and spent 20 to 40 percent of their cycle bleeding. This ratio is very similar to that in women, who normally bleed for 15 to 35 percent of their cycle.

To follow the mice’s periods, the team purged the rodents’ vaginas with saline solution each day for 18 days. To make sure the process did not result in bleeding, the team also treated five standard lab mice in the same way. The researchers also dissected uteruses extracted from four spiny mice, each at a various phase of the menstrual cycle.

The team followed up on their initial findings by sequencing the spiny mouse transcriptome, which is all of the RNA expressed at a certain point in time. The genetic data could explain how genes direct different stages of the spiny mouse’s menstrual cycle.

Warren Nothnick, a physiology researcher at the University of Kansas Medical Center, said it appears there is still a lot of work needed to show the spiny mouse is a good model for human menstruation. He admitted he is excited about the prospect of using these rodents to study endometriosis.

“There’s some really simple studies that they could do to see if these animals would develop endometriosis spontaneously,” he told Nature News.

Study author Hayley Dickinson, a reproductive physiologist at Monash University in Australia, said the potentially groundbreaking discovery was hiding in plain sight.

“The answer, as with many discoveries in science, is that no one really looked,” Dickinson said. “Everyone knew that rodents didn’t menstruate.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

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