Many people who menstruate experience intense pain and symptoms of depression like mood swings and irritability during their periods. Now, a new study suggests that there may actually be a genetic connection between period pain and depression.

For the study, researchers examined genetic data for roughly 600,000 people of European descent and 8,000 individuals from East Asia. They identified several genes that appear to play a role in both depression and menstrual pain, according to findings published in Briefings in Bioinformatics.

People with depression are 51 percent more likely to experience menstrual pain, the analysis found. In particular, individuals with depression and sleeplessness, a common symptom of the mood disorder, were 3 times more likely to suffer from period pain than people without depression, the study also found.

“In people with depression, changes in hormone levels and neurotransmitters can affect how the body processes pain,” says senior study author John Moraros, MD, PhD, a professor and dean of the School of Science at Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University in China. “This can lead to women suffering from more severe menstrual cramps.”

However, the study didn’t find an increased risk of developing depression among people who experience severe menstrual pain, also called dysmenorrhea.

How Depression and Period Cramps Are Related

“The absence of a causal link from period pain to depression may stem from the nature of how these conditions interact biologically,” Dr. Moraros says. “Dysmenorrhea can cause discomfort and distress, but it does not appear to have the same profound impact on mental health as depression does on physical symptoms.”

One limitation of the study is that researchers only looked at possible genetic connections between depression and period pain, and not at other factors that might play a role in these experiences, such as stress levels, exercise habits, or underlying medical conditions. It also wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how depression might directly cause period pain, or how dysmenorrhea might directly cause depression.

The findings also differ from some other recent research. One analysis of pooled data from 10 studies with roughly 4,700 participants found that people with dysmenorrhea were 72 percent more likely to develop depression than individuals without period pain.

How to Decrease Period Pain When You Have Depression

Even so, the new findings suggest that it may be possible for people with depression or sleep problems to reduce period pain by taking steps to improve their mental health and sleep, says Omar Gammoh, PhD, an associate professor of pharmacology at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

“Improving depression and sleep could result in lower intensity of period pain in a large portion of females,” Dr. Gammoh says. This might involve a range of interventions, such as talk therapy, peer support groups, lifestyle changes, or medication, Gammoh adds.