Tag: menopause

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For Menopausal Women, Obesity Can Increase Cancer Risk

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Thanksgiving dinner has turkey and cranberry sauce along with pumpkin pie. Christmas rings in the end of the year with egg nog and ginger bread cookies. During the holiday season, it can be difficult to resist these delicious treats. However, a new study shows that it may be better to avoid these tempting dishes and strike out on a more nutritious diet, particularly if you happen to be a middle-aged woman.

Researchers from the University of Colorado Cancer Center recently revealed that maintaining a healthy lifestyle during menopause could help reduce the risk of breast cancer later on.

To begin, females who are obese and postmenopausal have a greater risk of later developing breast cancer. They also found that the cancer that these women get can be more aggressive than for their healthier counterparts. The findings of the study were recently featured in the journal Cancer Research.

The team of investigators was interested in exploring ways of limiting the risk for breast cancer.

“By using nutrient tracers for fat and sugar, we tracked where the body stored excess calories. In lean models, excess fat and glucose were taken up by the liver, mammary and skeletal tissues. In obese models, excess fat and glucose were taken up by tumors, fueling their growth,” explained the study’s lead author Erin Giles, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cancer Center, in a prepared statement. Read full article.

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Menopause linked to higher brain aneurysm risk

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LOS ANGELES (KABC) — They sit silently in the heads of millions of Americans. They can burst without warning. Brain aneurysms rupture in about 30,000 people every year, killing or disabling many.

Women are at a higher risk for aneurysms than men. Now, researchers are taking a closer look at how a major change in a woman’s life could be to blame.

Sande Skinner thought she was having a stroke.

“The left side of my body got numb,” said Skinner. “It didn’t feel right.”

Skinner had a giant aneurysm right behind her right optic nerve. If ruptured, brain aneurysms can lead to stroke or death. Risk factors include smoking, high blood pressure and possibly lower estrogen levels caused by menopause. Two of the largest brain aneurysm trials in the world found most happen in menopausal women.

“Average age of rupture of all patients with aneurysms is age 52, which just so happens to be the average age of menopause,” said Dr. Dr. Michael Chen, a neurointerventionalist at Rush University Medical Center. Read full article.

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HPV infections return at menopause in women of sexual revolution

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Signs of the cancer-causing human papilloma virus in women near or at menopause may be a reawakened dormant infection, suggesting a risk for women who came of age in the “sexual revolution” in the 1960s and 70s.

About 77 percent of the infections were detected in women who reported five or more sexual partners in their lifetime, according to a study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. The findings released today suggest that reactivation of the sexually transmitted virus may increase around age 50 and be responsible for more later-life infections than new ones, researchers said.

The data raises a new concern for women now entering menopause, suggesting a significantly higher risk for HPV infections than those of the previous generation, researchers said. The findings may mean that women need to continue routine screening after age 40, said Patti Gravitt, one of the study authors.

“If we confirm this, we may want to re-evaluate our screening strategies and confirm they’re sufficient,” said Gravitt, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in a telephone interview. “If populations change their sexual behaviors, that will contribute to how we see age-specific HPV prevalence.”

HPV is found in about a quarter of teenage girls and about half of women 20 to 24, according to a 2007 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. There isn’t a good test for men. Previous studies have found that the virus isn’t detected in samples after about two years. Read full article.

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Why do women get hot flashes during menopause?

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Hot flushes affect millions of people, and not just women. Yet, it is still unclear what causes the episodes of temperature discomfort, often accompanied by profuse sweating.

Now a team of researchers around Dr. Naomi Rance, a professor in the department of pathology at the UA College of Medicine, has come closer to understanding the mechanism of hot flushes, a necessary step for potential treatment options down the road. This research was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team identified a group of brain cells known as KNDy neurons as a likely control switch of hot flushes. KNDy neurons (pronounced “candy”) are located in the hypothalamus, a portion of the brain controlling vital functions that also serves as the switchboard between the central nervous system and hormone signals.

“Although the KNDy neurons are a very small population of cells, our research reveals that they play extremely important roles in how the body controls its energy resources, reproduction and temperature,” said Melinda Mittelman-Smith, who led the study as part of her doctoral thesis. “They are true multitaskers.”

By studying KNDy neurons in rats, the research team created an animal model of menopause to elucidate the biological mechanisms of temperature control in response to withdrawal of the hormone estrogen, the main trigger of the changes that go along with menopause. Read full article.

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Predicting the age at menopause of women having suffered from childhood cancers

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This study provided important data about the fertility window of women who had suffered from childhood cancer and information concerning the associated risk factors, but did not confirm the greater risk of premature menopause (before the age of 40) that was reported by the American studies.

The results were published in the review Human Reproduction of November 15.

Women who have suffered from childhood cancer are known to run a greater risk of premature menopause. However, data about the associated risk factors is limited. Researchers from unit 1018 “Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health (CESP)” (Inserm/Université Paris-Sud/Institut Gustave Roussy) and from the AP-HP analyzed the data from a French cohort, named Euro2k, concerning 1522 survivors of childhood cancer diagnosed between 1945 and 1986 when they were under 18, initially in order to study the mortality rate. The study estimated the radiation doses received at the ovaries by the women in this cohort who had been treated by radiotherapy. 706 of these women filled in a detailed questionnaire about their state of health. 32% of these women had already reached the age of 40 years; 7% were over 50 years of age. The research team studied the age at menopause of these women and the potentially associated risk factors. The researchers based this study on self-reported questionnaires sent to the women in order to obtain information about the menopause, without confirming by measuring FSH levels.

Analysis of this data showed that 97 women (13,7%) were menopaused at a median age of 44 years, in other words, 7 years earlier than the general population. For a third of these women (36%), menopause was surgically induced. Read full article.

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Study links relaxation method to reduced hot flashes

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Although studies of the effects of relaxation techniques on menopause symptoms have yielded mixed results so far, a new report from Sweden comes down in favor of the approach as an alternative to hormone therapy.

Postmenopausal women trained to relax before and during the onset of hot flashes cut the frequency of those events in half during the three-month trial, researchers say. Women in a comparison group that got no treatments experienced little change in their symptoms.

“The results tell you that, yes, this seems to work,” said Kim Innes of West Virginia University, who has studied mind-body therapies for menopause symptoms but was not involved in the new study. “This was a moderate-sized trial that yielded promising – although not definitive – findings regarding the efficacy of applied relaxation,” she told Reuters Health.

In a review of more than a dozen previous clinical trials involving mediation, yoga and Tai Chi therapies, Innes concluded that these techniques may hold promise for relieving menopause symptoms, but it’s too soon to tell. Read full article.

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Hot flashes may return after ending antidepressant

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – For about a third of women taking antidepressants to treat menopause symptoms, hot flashes and night sweats will return after discontinuing the drug, according to a new study.

“It’s important for people to understand that…the benefit of the treatment is related to the duration of the treatment,” said Dr. Hadine Joffe, lead author of the study. But that shouldn’t discourage women from trying an antidepressant if they want to, she added.

“Just because symptoms come back after you stop it doesn’t mean it didn’t make a big difference when you took it,” said Joffe, who is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of research in the Center for Women’s Mental Health at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Escitalopram, an antidepressant sold under the brand name Lexapro, is not approved to treat menopause symptoms, but physicians may prescribe it because some – though not all – studies have found it can reduce the number and severity of hot flashes.

It has “a moderate effect,” Joffe told Reuters Health. “The drug does not eliminate hot flashes, but it can make “a very meaningful improvement in somebody’s life.”

Antidepressants of the same type as Lexapro, called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are also used to treat menopause symptoms. Read full article.

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Fertility Reflects Mom’s Age at Menopause

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Women whose mothers experienced early menopause are themselves likely to have an accelerated decline in fertility, Danish researchers found.

Median serum levels of an important marker of ovarian reserve, anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH), declined by 8.6% (95% CI 6.4 to 10.8,P<0.001) yearly in women whose mothers entered menopause at or before age 45, according to Janne Gasseholm Bentzen, MD, PhD, and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen.

In contrast, women with maternal menopause at ages 46 to 54 had a decline in median AMH of 6.8% (95% CI 5 to 8.6, P<0.001) each year, while those with later maternal menopause had an annual decrease of only 4.2% (95% CI 2 to 6.4, P<0.001), the researchers reported in Human Reproduction.

During recent decades many women have delayed childbearing, with the possible result that they may then have difficulties in conceiving if their ovarian reserve has begun to be depleted and oocyte quality lost. Many population-based studies have demonstrated a strong component of heritability for age at menopause, but whether this influence extends to fertility and ovarian viability has been unclear. Read full article.

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Soy Based Foods Have Little Impact on Easing Menopause: Study

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Soy-based products were found to have little impact on menopausal symptoms in a new study, contrary to long-held beliefs.

 The results of a new study derail the widely held notion that eating soy-based products like tofu and soy milk can help reduce menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats.

It was a hypothesis based on the fact that, overall, women of Asian ancestry report fewer menopausal symptoms than women of European background, scientists say.

With the onset of menopause, women’s hormone levels drop precipitously. Given that Asian women consume diets notably high in soy products —  which also happen to be rich in plant-based estrogen — scientists had long hypothesized that it was their dietary intake of estrogen that helped make up for the shortfall and ease menopausal symptoms. Read full article.

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Get Rid of Hot Flashes with Relaxation

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That’s the word from researchers at Baylor University’s Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory.

Relaxing — specifically, hypnotic relaxation therapy — reduced hot flashes in post-menopausal women by as much as 80 percent, researchers there have found. And it worked in a matter of weeks.

Besides that, women who used the relaxation therapy felt less anxious and depressed and said their quality of life was better.

Therapists provided the 187 women in the study with weekly hypnosis sessions. But participants also practiced self-hypnosis during the five-week study, according to an article published online Oct. 22 in Menopause: The Journal of The North American Menopause Society. Read full article.