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Weight loss helped women with obesity reduce hot flashes in menopause

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Women who are overweight or obese and experience hot flashes due to menopause might allay the symptom through behavioral weight loss, according to findings published in Menopause.

Shedding pounds to manage the mid-life transition could also promote healthy habits for women as they enter their post-menopausal years, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh suggested.

In a pilot study, Rebecca C. Thurston, PhD, of the university’s School of Medicine, and colleagues, randomized 40 women who were overweight or obese with at least 4 hot flashes per day to two cohorts — weight loss intervention or wait-list control.

Rebecca C. Thurston

Physiologic monitoring, diary entries and questionnaires were used to evaluate hot flashes before and after intervention. Wilcoxon tests allowed the researchers to compare changes in hot flashes and anthropometrics between conditions.

Feasibility and acceptability of the intervention were high, with 83% of women retained and 93.8% reporting satisfaction. For 74.1% of participants, hot flash reduction was a major motivator for weight loss.

Participants who received intervention lost more weight compared with the control group (–8.86 kg vs. 0.23 kg, P<.0001). Over 2 weeks, questionnaires showed greater reductions in hot flashes with intervention vs. control (–63.0 vs. –28.0; P=.03); this difference was not demonstrated in other hot flash measures. Weight reduction significantly correlated with decreases in hot flashes (eg, r=0.47, P=.006).

The findings run counter to previous beliefs about adiposity in relation to the common menopause symptom, the researchers wrote, and require further investigation.

“The results of this initial study challenge some long-held theories about hot flashes, and offer us a potential way to manage them,” Thurston said in a press release. “We are now designing a larger study which will more definitively test whether behavioral weight loss may reduce hot flashes.”

Disclosures: This study was supported by a NIH grant through the National Institute on Aging.