• Journal of the Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.52-60
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• 1996

Premenstrual symptoms can begin at anytime after menache and usually remit with menopause. Numerous studies of the premenstrual symptoms have been reported, based on mature woman and clinic patients. As yet, however, no prospective study has specially examined the extent or nature of PMS in adolescents. The authors investigated the pattern of mood, behavior and physical symptom changes in the menstrual cycle for 230 high school students who reported premenstrual symptoms by using Baily Rating form(DRF), The scores on 21 symptoms of DRF were recorded daily for at least one menstrual cycle. The results as follows : 1) 1.7%(4/230) of the subjects who reported premenstrual symptoms met criteria for premenstrual dysphoric disorder(PMDD) by 30% change criteria. 2) The pattern of symptom changes in the menstrual cycle showed a clear increase in mean daily symptom score at premenstrual -1,-2 day. and reaching a maximum scores at the first day, rapidly decreased at day 4 during menstruation. 3) The mean daily symptom score in the menstrual phase was significantly higher than those in the premenstrual and postmenstrual phase, and significantly higher in the premenstrual phase than that in postmenstrual phase. 4) The scores of the subjects with longer duration of menstrual bleeding were higher than those of the subjects with the shorter duration. Particularly in the menstrual phase, there was a significant difference on the mean scores of physical symptom duster between the longer and shorter group. These results demonstrated that the mean daily pattern of symptom changes in the menstrual cycle for the subjects was similar pattern of change for the PMDD group, except high level of symptom scores if premenstrual phase. The adolescents might experienced more physical discomfort than the other symptoms in the menstrual phase Especially the subject with longer duration of mense flow were more likely to report more discomfort than that of shorter duration.