Author(s)

Gregory N. Derry, Paula S. Derry

Paula Derry Enterprises in Health Psychology, Baltimore, USA.
Physics Department, Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, USA.

Time series analysis, based on the idea that female reproductive endocrine physiology can be construed as a nonlinear dynamical system in a chaotic trajectory, is performed to measure the correlation dimension of the menstrual cycle data from subjects in two different age cohorts. The dimension is computed using a method proposed by Judd (Physica D, vol. 56, 1992, pp. 216-228) that does not assume the correlation dimension to be necessarily constant for all appropriate time scales of the system’s strange attractor. Significant time scale differences are found in the behavior of the dimension between the two age cohorts, but at the shortest time scales the correlation dimension converges to the same value, approximately 5.5, in both cases.

Perimenopause; Menstruation; Time Series Analysis; Chaos; Correlation Dimension; Menopause

G. Derry and P. Derry, "Age Dependence of the Menstrual Cycle Correlation Dimension," Open Journal of Biophysics, Vol. 2 No. 2, 2012, pp. 40-45. doi: 10.4236/ojbiphy.2012.22006.