My wife has had terrible heavy periods for most of her life, with lots of bloating and cramping. Over the years, the doctors tried her on pretty much every type of birth control pill, usually making symptoms worse and bringing a lot of mood side effects. She's been off all of those for about 3 years.
Over the past two years, her bloating stopped going away in between periods. Suspecting some kind of food intolerance, she tried an elimination diet which included a full 6-month GFCF diet with no improvement. The bloating often seems worse at the end of the day, or after exercise.
A doctor put her on spironolactone, which helped a little, for a little while, and then stopped working -- and also stopped her period. Rather than take the doc's advice to try counteracting this side effect with another birth control pill, we weened her off the water pill over a period of 3 weeks, and now 2 months later her period has returned and she seems to be back to "normal."
Her blood tests were mostly normal -- TSH on the low side of normal (1.5), estrogen & progesterone normal. DHEA was a little high - idk what that means. Also, total cholesterol was a little high, which is a little unusual given her diet (low carb mostly-paleo).
Right now she's taking:
Jarrow B-Right b complex
1g time-released vitamin C and
Swanson red wine extract (w res & gse)
with breakfast +
200mg Magnesium (as malate) & 5000iu D3 at bedtime
Suspecting some kind of adrenal fatigue, I've got her started on very low dose pregnenolone (0.25mg/day right now)... too early to tell whether it's helping the water retention, but I think it may have helped get her period started again, which we were a little worried about.
We're all out of money for doctors and tests (which don't seem to be very helpful anyway.) Does anyone have any theories about what the symptom could mean, and how me might stop it?