Adolescent Perceptions of Menstruation on Twitter: Opportunities for Advocacy and Education.

PURPOSE: While some adolescents celebrate menstruation as a rite of passage, others seek discretion due to stigma. Many youth have used Twitter to combat stigma and raise awareness about other culturally taboo topics, but previous work has not explored youth conversations regarding menstruation. This study aims to assess whether Twitter can provide useful insights into how youth perceive menstruation. METHODS: The team searched 162,316,839 tweets of 71,443 users of the age range 13-25 years in the Health Language Processing Twitter Youth Cohort for tweets that matched menstruation-related keywords: a pad, my pad, my period, her period, your period, tampon, diva cup, menstruate, that time of the month. Twelve codes emerged using a grounded theory approach and were sorted into three themes. RESULTS: Analysis was conducted on 10,000 tweets. Three themes emerged, including menstrual health, menstrual stigma, and menstrual positivity. Tweets related to menstrual health included physical complications, sexual/reproductive health, health education, and LGBTQ health. Tweets that addressed menstrual stigma included inconvenience/limitations, shame/stereotypes, religion/alternate perceptions, access/affordability, and self-depreciation/harm. Tweets related to menstrual positivity included awareness/community, strength/resilience, and environment/sustainability. DISCUSSION: This study provides insights into youth perceptions about menstruation. There was overwhelming emphasis placed on the negative expectations and shame around menstruation. A significant minority of tweets were directly or indirectly related to advocacy or education, which supports the potential use of Twitter as a platform to improve public health messaging, transform health outcomes, and promote equity among youth who menstruate.

Manipulation of Fgf and Bmp signaling in teleost fishes suggests potential pathways for the evolutionary origin of multicuspid teeth.

Teeth with two or more cusps have arisen independently from an ancestral unicuspid condition in a variety of vertebrate lineages, including sharks, teleost fishes, amphibians, lizards, and mammals. One potential explanation for the repeated origins of multicuspid teeth is the existence of multiple adaptive pathways leading to them, as suggested by their different uses in these lineages. Another is that the addition of cusps required only minor changes in genetic pathways regulating tooth development. Here we provide support for the latter hypothesis by demonstrating that manipulation of the levels of Fibroblast growth factor (Fgf) or Bone morphogenetic protein (Bmp) signaling produces bicuspid teeth in the zebrafish (Danio rerio), a species lacking multicuspid teeth in its ancestry. The generality of these results for teleosts is suggested by the conversion of unicuspid pharyngeal teeth into bicuspid teeth by similar manipulations of the Mexican Tetra (Astyanax mexicanus). That these manipulations also produced supernumerary teeth in both species supports previous suggestions of similarities in the molecular control of tooth and cusp number. We conclude that despite their apparent complexity, the evolutionary origin of multicuspid teeth is positively constrained, likely requiring only slight modifications of a pre-existing mechanism for patterning the number and spacing of individual teeth.