Losing Excess Weight May Help Middle-Aged Women To Reduce The Unpleasant Hot Flashes Accompanying Menopause

Losing Excess Weight May Help Middle-Aged Women To Reduce The Unpleasant Hot Flashes Accompanying Menopause.
Weight damage might helper middle-aged women who are overweight or stout reduce bothersome hot flashes accompanying menopause, according to a redone study. "We've known for some time that obesity affects hot flashes, but we didn't identify if losing weight would have any effect," said Dr Alison Huang, the study's author. "Now there is esteemed evidence losing weight can reduce hot flashes".

Study participants were part of an intensified lifestyle-intervention program designed to help them lose between 7 percent and 9 percent of their weight. Huang, aide-de-camp professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco, said the findings could produce women with another reason to take control of their weight. "The message here is that there is something you can do about it (hot flashes)".

About one third of women sustain hot flashes for five years or more last menopause, "disrupting sleep, interfering with work and leisure activities, and exacerbating anxiety and depression," according to the study. The women in the research group met with experts in nutrition, exercise and behavior weekly for an hour and were encouraged to utilization at least 200 minutes a week and reduce caloric intake to 1200-1500 calories per day. They also got relief planning menus and choosing what kinds of foods to eat.

Women in a switch group received monthly group education classes for the earliest four months. Participants, including those in the control group, were asked to respond to a survey at the beginning of the contemplation and six months later to describe how bothersome hot flashes were for them in the past month on a five-point ranking with answers ranging from "not at all" to "extremely".

They were also asked about their daily exercise, caloric intake, and psychotic and physical functioning using instruments widely accepted in the medical field, said Huang. No correlation was found between any of these and a reduction in bosh flashes, but "reduction in weight, body mass index finger (BMI), and abdominal circumference were each associated with improvements" in reducing hot flashes, according to the study, published in the July 12 child of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Huang said that caloric intake and exert were measured by the participants, who were not always accurate, but "weight can be measured by stepping on scale," so weight loss is a "more conscientious measure" of what happened. About 340 study participants, at least 30 years old, were recruited from a larger burn the midnight oil of overweight and obese middle-aged women suffering from incontinence. They were not told the lucubrate was examining the effect of weight loss on hot flashes.

At the study's start, about half of both the look and control groups reported having hot flashes; about half of these were at least within reason bothered, and 8,4 percent were extremely bothered. By six months, 49 percent in the bone up group, compared with 41 percent in the control group, reported reform by "at least one category of bothersomeness".

That might not seem like a big difference. But Huang added that, "although 41 percent of women in the put down group experienced improvement in grandiloquence flashes, quite of few of them experienced improvement by only one category of 'bothersomeness' (as opposed to two categories). Also, of those women in the dominate group who did not experience improvement, relatively more of them experienced actual worsening of blistering flashes (as opposed to no change)".

Dr Elizabeth Poynor, an obstetrician-gynecologist affiliated with Lenox Hill Hospital, said the examine findings are "good news. I think this cram provides a ground work to look at it (hot flashes) in larger, more detailed and comprehensive studies. It's very promising".

Poynor said the reading provides an impetus to women who need to lose millstone for other health reasons, such as diabetes or heart disease, because it can reduce problems like sleep tumult that can lead to problems with concentration and poor functioning in general. "It can really help to have a very significant altered blue blood of life," said Poynor, noting that the physiology of hot flashes, "at least in cause a vascular event," is poorly understood and needs more study lakshan. "However, this study provides women and their healthiness care professionals who care for them another intervention to help with bothersome hot flashes in women who are overweight".