Can a Virus Delay Your Period?

Can a virus delay your period? Although it sounds a little less likely but you will be surprised to know that a virus indeed can delay your period, directly or indirectly it can affect your menstrual cycle.

1. Understanding the Menstrual Cycle

A menstrual cycle length can vary due to a lot of reasons. There can be missed periods or reduced menstrual volume, even longer menstrual cycles can happen.

Some of the reasons that affect the menstrual cycle are stress, use of birth control, weight gain or loss, change in a workout, and many more factors.

Stress is a very big factor and has been elaborately described below. Other than stress, if a person suddenly puts on a lot of weight it becomes very difficult for the body to ovulate, conversely if you suddenly lose a lot of weight it might lead to irregular cycles.

If the amount of workout increases, gradually the body develops acceptance however, if the exercise gets very intense it becomes difficult for the body to cope with it and affects your reproductive health.

If you are undergoing hormone therapy, it will temporarily alter sex hormones, and if there is a change in the medication it might affect your menstruation too.

If we consider medical reasons then, polycystic ovary syndrome and hypothyroidism are two causes of disturbed menstruation cycles.

2. Stress and Menstrual Irregularities Due to the Pandemic

If you are a person who gets very regular menstrual cycles, it might be concerning even if it gets delayed by a couple of days.

Stress is among the most common reasons for irregular periods or delayed periods, and not just this but also premenstrual symptoms, vaginal bleeding, and painful periods.

The pandemic in the background has created heightened stress scenarios everywhere. The panic is so much, that even without catching the virus there are distressing developments.

There are various reasons, the fear of catching the virus, the uncertainty of its effects, the fear of losing a loved one, the problems with the office, and working from home.

There has been so much to stress about during the pandemic that menstrual cycle changes happened too much, disruptions have affected women’s health and there have been noticeable changes in their lives along with menstrual changes.

3. How Illness Impacts Hormones?

The menstrual cycle is controlled and regulated by an array of hormones, and these hormones are also continually interacting with the immune system so they impact the whole body.

Stress impacts our hormonal system in various ways for example if a person is under a lot of stress before they are ovulating then the brain is signaled to not prepare the body for pregnancy so this delays the release of ovulation causing hormones, which eventually delays your menstrual cycles as these are very much affected by your mental health.

If the stress is perpetual, then it might cause no ovulation which leads to missing periods. If there is a period of stress after ovulation that leads to a shorter luteal phase, which causes an early period.

Here also the ulterior motive of the body is to not get pregnant, and to prevent pregnancy the body shortens the luteal phase so the process of conceiving a zygote is not possible.

4. COVID-19 and Cycle Changes: Can a Virus Delay Your Period?

There have been a lot of cases reported where women have changes in their menstruation cycles during and after Covid, if that is via the disease or the vaccine dose we do not know the exact reason yet.

For patients who have been severely ill with the virus have experienced serious impacts on their cycles. Severe illness with the disease led to patients having longer cycles than before.

But more research revealed that these effects terminated two to three months after their discharge from the hospital.

Little research even supports that the time of the cycle you are in when you get infected by the virus also makes a difference as to how much your cycle will be affected.

In some days of the cycle, the hormone levels are different than the others which changes the body’s immune response towards these hormones.

There have been various studies conducted across the globe to study the effect of pandemic stress on menstruation.

Researchers found that there has been normal to no change after the first dose of vaccine, however after the second dose of vaccine for the novel coronavirus different repercussions were seen.

Some people observed heavier bleeding than usual, another set observed delays in their cycle. More than 40% of the participants however felt that after the third cycle (from the second dose) they did not really feel the influence, and the symptoms therefore were temporary.

It has been medically reviewed that although there have been changes in menstruation, results as such have been observed with fertility in men or women when compared before and after the pandemic.

Research has also revealed that women affected by endometriosis or PCOS have been affected more by the infection than others.

As these people are already susceptible to cycle length changes they are more prone to getting affected even by the two doses of the vaccine.

5. Other Side-Effects of the Vaccine

Not only the period cycle, but other systems of the body are also affected by the vaccine doses.

People have experienced nausea, fatigue, fevers, and chills. Along with the general symptoms like pain, redness, and swelling.

Some feel that every different brand of the vaccine had different side effects on the body, although this could even be medical propaganda as no concrete results have been proven, but this surely has led scientists to find new methods of disease control.

6. Final Thoughts

To sum up we can safely say that if you feel any irregular trends in your periods you should primarily consider testing for pregnancy.

If that is not the case and the condition lasts for a long time and is accompanied by other symptoms as well then consider visiting a doctor and getting treatment for the same.