Women With HIV May Suffer More From Hot Flashes

THURSDAY, July 11 (HealthDay News) -- As women infected with HIV live longer, new evidence is suggesting that menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes may affect them worse than women who don't carry the virus.

"Perimenopausal HIV-infected women experience greater hot flash severity and greater hot flash-related interference with daily activities and quality of life," compared to non-infected women going through menopause, report researchers led by Sara Looby of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Excessive menopausal symptoms might even compromise the health of HIV-positive women, including their ability to adhere to drug therapy and abstain from drugs and alcohol, the team said.

Looby and her coleagues urged doctors who care for middle-aged HIV-infected women to evaluate their hot flashes and offer effective treatment.

For the study, the researchers surveyed 33 HIV-infected women, aged 45-48, with irregular menstrual cycles (perimenopause) and compared their responses with those of perimenopausal women without HIV.

The women with HIV typically experienced moderate hot flashes while the women without HIV mild hot flashes. The HIV-infected women also had more sleep problems, more depressed moods, irritability and anxiety.

Hot flashes also interfered more with HIV-infected women's work, social and leisure activities, concentration, relationships with others, sexuality, enjoyment of life and overall quality of life.

In fact, the harmful effect of hot flashes among women with HIV was greater than what has been reported for breast cancer survivors, according to the study published online July 3 in the journal Menopause.

It's not clear why hot flashes are worse in HIV-infected women and further research is needed to learn the answers, the study authors said.

More information

The U.S. Office on Women's Health has more about menopause.

SOURCE: Menopause, July 3, 2013

Menopausal Hot Flashes Reduced By Chinese Herbal Mix

A Chinese herbal formula halved the number of hot flashes menopausal women experienced, a Hong Kong study showed.

The frequency of daily hot flashes dropped by 62 percent for women taking a herbal mix called Er-xian decoction, or EXD, compared to a 52 percent drop among women taking placebo. Investigators reported the findings this week in the Journal of the North American Menopause Society.

"It's a modest effect but not a zero effect," said Katherine Newton, a researcher at Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, who has studied herbal menopause remedies. Newton told Reuters she would recommend the treatment to women only after seeing more, long-term studies demonstrating safety but said the current study - which she was not involved in - looked promising as an alternative menopause treatment.

Presently, physicians consider hormone replacement therapy most effective for relieving discomfiture associated with menopause, though side effects include greater risk of breast cancer and heart disease - in addition to brain shrinkage, which increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

Previous study of EXD, comprised of compounds extracted from the roots, stems or leaves of six Chinese herbs, found promise in the treatment, said Yao Tong, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who co-authored the study. In an effort to conduct higher quality experimentation of the herb, ingested as a tea tincture, Tong and colleagues followed 101 menopausal women in their 40s and 50s as they drank the formula twice daily for 12 weeks.

Half of the women drank a 15 gram dose while the others drank a mix of tea, caramel and a compound called gardenin. During the two weeks prior to treatment, the women recorded their hot flashes, with the study group reporting an average of 5.8 compared to the control group's five per day. Following treatment, the number of incidences dropped to 2.2 among those receiving EXD and 2.5 among those receiving placebo.

Yet, the more dramatic difference came three months after cessation of treatment, with rate of hot flashes staying at 2.2 per day for the study group and rising slightly for the control group to 2.9 per day.

"Menopausal flushing is notoriously responsive to fluctuations and placebo responses in clinical trials, yet they have rigorously demonstrated an improvement in favor of active treatment" with Er-xian decoction, said Dr. Alan Bensoussan, the director of the Centre for Complementary Medicine Research at the University of Western Sydney, told Reuters.

The severity of the menopausal symptoms also declined to a greater degree among women taking the treatment, from a three out of four rating at the beginning of the study to a 1.6. By comparison, the control group experienced a decline in symptom severity from three to 2.3 on the four-point subjective scale.

"It's a small effect, but a measurable effect," said Newton, adding that the findings put the treatment on par with other alternative medicines on the market.

The researchers reported in their study that Chinese traditional medicine sees menopause symptoms as related to deficiencies in kidney "yin and yang," noting that EXD contains herbs known for enhancing such kidney functions.

However, other researchers criticized the study, saying Tong and colleagues had failed to accurately report chemical profiling of key ingredients and selected chemical markers in the herbal remedy, making the study hard to reproduce.

Ref Source:

http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/14465/20130330/menopause-menopausal-hormone-therapy-alternative-medicine-exd-chinese-herbs.htm
http://frenchtribune.com/teneur/1317080-chinese-herb-helps-menopausal-hot-flashes-study