[teamhappy]

Here's the paper: http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8852185/Kohen.pdf...

The first sentence is: "Tampons are used by up to 70 percent of menstruating women in the United States today, and the average woman may use as many as 16,800 tampons in her lifetime."

[cheshire137]

Using tampons doesn't rule out using pads, too. If I use a tampon one day, I'm one of that 70% of menstruating women that uses tampons. If I use a pad when I swap out that tampon, I'm now also one of the x% of menstruating women that uses pads.

[teamhappy]

Realised that the second I pasted the text. It's midnight in Germany ... That's the original link I found: http://askville.amazon.com/AMERICAN-WOMEN-TAMPONS-PADS-PERIO...

And here is another statistic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22980411

They're both not clear though I do think it's fair to say tampons are preferred. Just google for "tampons vs. pads".

[larve]

how do you use 16800 tampons over a lifetime? that's one a day for 46 years.

[ghshephard]

Well, if you change your tampon ever 2-3 hours, then you end up using 4-5 a day, which can run up to 30-35 tampons a month, which averages out to a little more than one a day.

[fulafel]

That's US only.