Psychological correlates of functional secondary amenorrhoea

15 women with functional secondary amenorrhoea and 15 controls (matched closely in age and educational status) were compared as to their knowledge of menstruation, their attitude towards those parts of the body likely to be associated with sexuality, and the amount of life events over the 6-month period preceding the onset of amenorrhoea, or an analogue time-span for control subjects. Comparison of means confirmed the research hypotheses: Knowledge of menstruation proved to be significantly lower and attitude towards sexuality-related body parts was significantly more negative in women with amenorrhoea than in control women (p less than 0.01 each). Also, in agreement with our expectations, subjects with amenorrhoea showed more problems in their partner-related sexuality than control subjects did (p less than 0.05), and had experienced more negative life events before the onset of amenorrhoea than the healthy group had over an analogue period of time (p less than 0.05).