Doctors in India have described a rare clinical case of a woman receiving emergency treatment for bloody tears during her period. According to doctors, regular periods can sometimes trigger bleeding outside the uterus.
A team of doctors from the PGIMER institute in Chandigarh (India) described an astonishing clinical case in a publication in the journal BMJ Case Reports on March 9, 2021. A 25-year-old woman - wishing to remain anonymous - was taken to hospital for tears of blood flowing down her face. Doctors diagnosed this woman – who was menstruating at the time of hospitalization – with a very rare disease :hemolacria. There are only a handful of cases in the world. Usually, this disease is linked to health concerns such as inflammation, hypertension, tumor or even anemia.
The only thing is, the young woman's bloody tears flowed at the start of her period , twice a month and this several times. In conclusion, doctors claimed that regular menstruation can cause bleeding outside the uterus. This phenomenon is called vicarious menstruation. Concretely, the flow of blood is subject to a diversion to other parts of the body, like the nose, the ears but also the skin, the eyes, the intestines or even the lungs.
Doctors explained that certain types of eye tissue can be influenced by hormonal changes . During the different phases of the menstrual period, pregnancy and lactation, the curve and thickness of a woman's cornea can vary. This could therefore be the reason for the appearance of bloody tears in the patient during menstruation.
The patient also underwent a physical, ophthalmological and radiological evaluation. These examinations revealed no other possible cause . In addition, a complete examination made it possible to observe that she had no other health problem or anomaly that could explain these tears. Thus, it would be a very unusual convergence of menstruation and hemolacria, in other words an ocular vicarious menstruation . As a treatment, the doctors gave the patient oral contraceptives in order to act on the hormones. After three months of therapy, her bloody tears disappeared.
For the authors of the publication, this case is the very first of its kind described in recent scientific literature . However, they also believe that more research needs to be done in order to fully understand the origin of this phenomenon.
