Hot flashes during menopause may reduce heart disease risk: study
February 28, 2011
Kenyon Wallace
TORONTO STAR
They can come at the most inopportune time. The skin goes clammy and red. The temperature suddenly seems to rise. The heart starts beating rapidly.
Hot flashes are often characterized as the most annoying symptom of menopause, and have been linked with a greater risk of heart attack and stroke.
But new research suggests that the sooner women experience hot flashes during their menopause experience, the better. According to a new study in Menopause, the journal of the North American Menopause Society, women who go through the bothersome episodes earlier on in menopause appear to have a decreased risk of stroke later in life.
“Contrary to what most people had suspected, having hot flashes in early menopause, which is the most common time for women to have hot flashes, was not associated with increasing cardiovascular risk as much as previous studies had suggested,” said Dr. Emily Szmuilowicz, a professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
“We found that these symptoms were associated with a decrease in risk of cardiovascular events — stroke, and death.”
The research examined the results of questionnaires about menopause symptoms filled out by more than 60,000 women in their early 60s over a 10-year period.
The researchers found that 11 per cent of women who reported late hot flashes died of heart attacks. That number dropped to about 6 per cent for women who reported early hot flashes.
The pattern was the same for cardiac events that were non-fatal. Of those who said they experienced hot flashes early on in menopause, just 2.5 per cent ended up having non-fatal heart attacks. That number more than doubled for women who had hot flashes later in menopause.
Szmuilowicz cautioned, however, that the women who experienced symptoms later in menopause and appeared to have an increased risk of heart disease and death belonged to a smaller sample size than those who had hot flashes at the onset of menopause.
“The main thing to take away from the study is that really this is a reassurance to women who experience these symptoms at the most common time,” she said.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in Canada and the United States. Men are more likely to develop heart disease early in life, but women tend to catch up during and after menopause.
Hot flashes occur when blood vessels near the surface of the skin dilate, thanks to hormonal changes that occur during menopause, said Dr. Felicia Mendelsohn, an endocrinologist based in Greenwich, Connecticut. The diluted blood vessels create the sudden feeling of warmth most women experience.
“When there is higher reactivity of the blood vessels, you’re going to get more of these temperature changes and the hot flashes that come along with that,” Mendelsohn said, noting that previous research suggested that the higher reactivity in blood vessels could trigger other cardiovascular risk factors.
She said the new research is still very preliminary and stressed that there are often other risk factors for heart disease in patients, such as hypertension and diabetes, that doctors still need take into account.
“But if someone has, say, no other risk factors and is otherwise healthy, and we see that they’re having the hot flashes earlier, then maybe we’ll be even more reassured,” she said.
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