The use of menstrual hygiene products and its effect on women’s health remains under studied. Patterns of menstrual hygiene product use and the rationale behind choices among Korean women aged 18–45 years were examined.

This cross-sectional study was a part of the Korea Nurses’ Health Study. A total of 20,613 nurses participated, and 8,658 nurses participated in Module 7 which included a menstrual hygiene products-related survey. The data were collected through the mobile survey using a self-reported questionnaire. Participants’ use of menstrual hygiene products and related characteristics were analyzed using frequency (percentage) or mean (SD).

The most common types of menstrual hygiene products across all age groups were disposable menstrual pads (89.0%), followed by cloth menstrual pads (4.5%), tampons (4.2%), and only 1.6% used a menstrual cup. Disposable menstrual pads were the most common across all age groups, but in those aged under 30 years this was followed by tampon use (6%). The most important criteria when choosing a menstrual hygiene product was comfort for disposable menstrual pads (31.3%) and tampons (41.5%), natural ingredients or organic products for cloth menstrual pads (51.4%), and custom fit for the menstrual cup (50.7%). However, for all menstrual hygiene products (except cloth menstrual pads), there was a higher proportion of anxiety than perception of safety, and low awareness of toxic shock syndrome.

It is important for women to use menstrual hygiene products with confidence. More research is needed to better understand potential health effects of menstrual hygiene products.

This research aimed to understand the popularity of topics in the field of women’s health through analysis of online news articles which were chronologically classified and examined to determine how women’s health and diseases had changed over time.

Women’s health and disease news articles were collated from a popular news website between 1993 to 2015 and preprocessed using gynecological medical terminology, Korean words and nouns (excluding general nouns not related to women’s healthcare topics). The resultant articles (N = 7,710) were analyzed using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm and major topics were extracted. Topic trends were analyzed by year and period for women’s health.

It was observed that most of the women’s health articles were focused on “Healthcare”, and 9 other topics were identified that represented a relatively small proportion in 1993–2000. In 2001–2005, most of the articles were focused on “Medical Services” and “Dietary Supplements” with some specific topics that peaked people’s interest, as compared to those focused on “Healthcare” in the 1990s. It was also observed that differences in the proportion of each topic was small after 2011.

Changes in topics related to women’s disease were not clearly distinguished in the 1990s but this changed from 2001where articles related to “women disease” appeared as articles on the topics of various diseases.