Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Type 1 diabetic women have generally more menstrual disorders than healthy women.

Objectives: Identify the main mechanisms responsible of menstrual disorders in type1 diabetic women.

Patients and methods: We conducted a comparative transversal study including 70 patients with type 1 diabetes: Thirty-three having menstrual disorders (group M) and 37 with regular menses (control group T).

We compared the clinical, metabolic and hormonal features of these two groups, in order to access a possible correlation between these parameters and menstrual disorders in these patients.

Results: Our study shows that patients who had a delayed menarche had a diabetes duration significantly longer than the other patients (P=0.02).

On the other hand, our patients were overdosed in basal insulin and the dose of basal insulin was significantly higher in group M (0.78 IU/kg per day vs 0.61 IU/kg per day; P=0.008).

Also, in group T, BMI was significantly lower in patients with 25–28 days menses compared to those who had 30–32 days menses (P=0.02).

Hormonal assays showed significant negative correlation between the total daily insulin dose and SHBG (P=0,005).

Similarly, we found that the average testosterone level increased with the insulin dose, but without any significant correlation.

Conclusion: The overdose of basal insulin may explain a large part of the menstrual disorders in type 1 diabetes. Obesity can worsen the situation and increase the menses duration.