Question: Does Malaria affect the menstrual cycle?

Julian Rayner answered on 25 Mar 2011:

Great question lovelalic, never thought of that one before!

One of the major complications of malaria is severe anemia, which means that you don’t have enough red blood cells. This is because at one stage of the malaria parasite’s life cycle, it lives inside your red blood cells, using the hemoglobin (the protein that carries oxygen around your body) for food to fuel its growth and multiplication. After the parasite goes into a red blood cell, 48 hours later anywhere between 8 and 32 parasites come out, and invade new red blood cells. You can imagine with a multiplication rate like that, it chews through red blood cells pretty fast. So in theory there could be some affect on menstruation, although honestly I don’t think there would be much, because it is controlled by hormone cycles that the parasite should not affect.

A much bigger problem is the effect of malaria on pregnancy. Pregnant women can get massive infections of malaria parasites in their placentas, which affects oxygen and nutrient uptake by the developing fetus. This is a major cause of premature birth, still birth, and low birth weight babies in Africa. It is also one of the areas where there is a huge amount of research, because there are reasons to hope that it might be possible to develop a pregnancy-specific malaria vaccine.