The effect of Teucrium polium capsules on the trend of primary dysmenorrhea using pair copula Bayesian network

Primary dysmenorrhea is one of the common causes of decreased efficiency at work, education, and reduced quality of life in women. Therefore, this study was performed with aim to determine the effect of Teucrium polium L. capsules on the changes of pain intensity and duration among patients with primary dysmenorrhea. This triple-blind, controlled, randomized clinical trial was performed on 70 female students with primary dysmenorrhea in selected dormitories of Shahid Beheshti University in 2014. The subjects were randomly divided in two intervention and control groups. During first three days of menstrual period, the intervention group was treated with Teucrium polium L. capsules every 6 hours, and the control group received the starch powder capsules during two consequent months. The associations between duration and intensity of dysmenorrhea pain in different time periods were determined based on Bayesian network and data were analyzed statistically using Pair-copulas. Data analysis was performed using SPSS software (version 20) and R (versions 1, 3, 4 (and independent t test, Mann-Whitney test, and pair-copula Bayesian network model. Given the fitting model, the patients who experienced high-intensive pain before the intervention had very high decrease of pain during the first month using Teucrium polium L. capsules (λ1=0). In the subjects with the lowest pain duration (3 days), there was no significant effect after using capsules in the first month (λ1=0.51, λu=0.51), but the significant effect of capsules was recorded in the second month for these patients. Teucrium polium capsule can be considered one of the drugs with high effect for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea, because this drug has very high decreasing effect for patients who suffer from intensive and long duration menstrual pain.