"It isn't just your imagination – or the fact that it's Monday morning. Getting out of bed is such an effort and at breakfast you snap at your children or partner. As you head out of the door, bloated and grumpy, you don’t know how you will get through the day and by the middle of the afternoon you have eaten a whole packet of biscuits and a couple of chocolate bars.

"Sound familiar? If you’ve been feeling something like this around the middle of your monthly cycles, you could have pre-menstrual syndrome – and you're not alone. The condition affects up to 90 per cent of women before they reach the menopause. PMS, it has to be said, has had a terrible press, and women who suffer from it have sometimes been portrayed as red-eyed monsters on the rampage. For the vast majority of sufferers, however, PMS is much less dramatic, while still remaining a definite problem in their lives.

"The term 'PMS' describes any symptoms that happen between ovulation and the start of the period. And there are over 150 of them, from food cravings, breast tenderness, headaches and irritability to mood swings and crying spells. They can come in all sorts of combinations, and range form mildly annoying to very severe.

"You may decide you can just live with them. But if PMS is preventing you from working and playing as freely as you’d like, you'll need to take a harder look at what you can do about it. That’s where this book comes in.

"In Part One we'll be looking at causes, symptoms, diagnoses and conventional treatments for PMS. But first, let's glance at the PMS puzzle – the confusions and ambiguities surrounding a condition that for many of us remains all too real.

Not just all in the mind

"Because PMS involves so many symptoms – which seem to increase yearly – it has been difficult to pin down. And there are other problems. The symptoms begin in the days leading up to a period, and disappear when a period begins. And yet when doctors examined one group made up of women with PMS and one group without, and measured hormone levels in the second half of their cycles, they found no difference in the two groups’ hormone profiles..."