By Krystnell and Storr
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A small study suggests that women would start, and stick to, a diet to lose weight if the diet promises to alleviate hot flashes.
“The majority of women, or more than 80 percent, said that the possibility of reducing hot flashes increased their motivation to lose weight,” said Gary Elkins, professor and director of the Mind Body Medicine Research Laboratory at Baylor University. , Waco, Texas, and who did not participate in the study. “That just highlights how annoying hot flashes can be for women.”
Researchers are still ignorant of the role of fatty tissue in the frequency of perimenopausal hot flashes. Estrogen acts on the body and mind, including, perhaps, the regulation of body temperature.
The team of Rebecca Thurston, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pennsylvania, says that hot flashes and night sweats affect up to 70 percent of women.
The only treatment that is approved is hormone replacement therapy. Two antidepressants can be used to treat menopausal symptoms, and some studies suggest that lifestyle changes, through diet, exercise, meditation, or relaxation, help some women.
The team recruited 40 overweight or obese women who had four or more hot flashes a day and wanted to lose weight. They randomly divided them into two groups: one received information to control caloric intake and set physical activity goals, while the other (control group) joined a waiting list to receive the intervention at six months.
The participants answered questionnaires about symptoms and were weighed by the researchers at the beginning and end of the study. The women recorded their hot flashes in personal diaries, and occasionally during the study, the women who dieted and exercised used a sensor to measure skin temperature and have a physical record of the frequency of hot flashes.
At six months, 83 percent of the women participating in the intervention were still in the study and 94 percent said they were satisfied with the program, according to the team’s publication in Menopause. Those women lost about 8.5 kg, with 5 percent less body fat and fewer hot flashes at the end of the study.
The team found evidence that the greater the weight loss, the greater the reduction in hot flashes.
“In terms of the actual role weight loss would have played versus other intervention outcomes, such as psychological factors, the results support the notion that weight loss was most important in countering hot flashes,” the author said.
SOURCE: Menopause, 2014.
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