Hot Flushes – All In Your Head?

Are women’s health problems all in the mind? A major study suggests too many doctors may think so as research led by Cambridge and East Anglia universities and published in The Lancet eClinicalMedicine journal suggests women are paying the price for some medical prejudices.

Also, earlier this year, a YouGov survey of almost 5,000 adults found that 70 per cent of women said GPs had not taken their concerns seriously, compared with 52 per cent of men.

What does that mean for your symptoms?

This study was published in the journal Cerebral Cortex by Professor Robert Freedman and his co-researcher Vaibhav Diwadkar, both experts in psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences.

This study was published in the journal Cerebral Cortex by Professor Robert Freedman and his co-researcher Vaibhav Diwadkar, both experts in psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences.

Professor Freedman understands hot flushes well and notes that they are unique because they come from within the body, making them difficult to study.

What the study showed

The researchers wanted to understand how the brain responds during hot flushes. They had participants lie in an MRI scanner while being heated by two body-sized heating pads for up to two hours, waiting for a hot flush to occur.

I must admit you would not have got me to volunteer, a fact that the lead researcher acknowledged. He said this could be uncomfortable for the participants and praised them, saying, “They were heroic, and the study could not have happened without their amazing cooperation.”

One of his colleagues, Diwadkar, pointed out that menopause and hot flushes are important issues for women’s health and noted that there is still a limited understanding of why hot flushes happen in the brain.

To address this, they studied 20 postmenopausal women, aged 47 to 58, over one year. These women reported having six or more hot flushes each day.

The researchers measured skin conductance levels, which indicate how much someone is sweating. They focused on the brain stem, which is involved in regulating temperature, and on other brain areas related to how someone feels.

They found that activity in certain brain areas, like the brain stem, increases before a hot flush actually starts.

This provides strong evidence about where they come from and supports the idea that stress may trigger them. The researchers are also looking at how MRI imaging can be used alongside treatments to see if specific menopause medications could change brain responses.

This means they are exploring the effects of supplements or medications, and there are already many personal stories about these methods.

Great, but what can I do now?!

There are many ways to help manage hot flushes, and what works can be very individual as it varies from woman to woman. The pharmaceutical option your Doctor offers will be HRT, however some women find the side effects and health risks of HRT unacceptable, or they cannot use it due to a history or risk of breast cancer.

Phytoestrogens, such as soy, red clover, and seeds like flax, sunflower, and sesame, can help some women if flushes are mild and infrequent and herbal combinations containing black cohosh and dong quai are popular too.

Complementary therapies like acupuncture, Ayurveda, aromatherapy, and homeopathy can help but can be more effective when combined with rebalancing the fluctuating hormones and increased stress that flushes can cause.

Bioidentical natural progesterone can be effective for controlling flushes during and after menopause. Serenity is a progesterone only cream that many find effective, but if flushes are more severe adding a little oestrogen will help in Wellsprings combination cream Twenty to One.

It is clear that increased stress and anxiety will make flushes worse, as indeed that will also impact all your other systems and reactions.

However there are also many other factors that can influence flushes such as your diet and lifestyle and this article will give you more information on that.

Anxiety and Hot Flushes – What’s The Connection?