Hot Flashes

They've been joked about and made light of but hot flashes are no laughing matter to the women who experience them. About 70 percent of all menopausal women suffer from these erratic and embarrassing flushes.

A hot flash usually starts as a warm, spreading sensation inside your chest. You get hotter, become flushed and break into a sweat. Within minutes the heat wave passes, and you're left feeling cold, damp and sticky.

These flashes can occur when your ovaries stop making the hormone estrogen (at menopause) or when the ovaries are removed, as sometimes happens during a hysterectomy. Dr Penny Wise Budoff, author of No More Hot Flashes and Other Good News, says most victims suffer with hot flashes for more than a year. Maybe a third of them have the problem for five years and some women have them for 30 years' she says

After having a hysterectomy two years ago, a high caliber real estate broker, got fed up. A hot flash struck her every 30 or 40 minutes. “Trying to look and act classy while showing million-dollar apartments can be difficult when sweat is pouring down your head," she says. Her doctor prescribed estrogen to reduce the flashes. Although long used as a treatment for hot flashes estrogen-replacement therapy was linked to an increased risk of uterine cancer in the mid-1970s. The evidence against it is inconclusive, however, and it’s staging a comeback.

A professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas, says the incidence of uterine cancer is relatively low - one in 1,000 - and that estrogen therapy only increases that risk by six times, putting it at six in 1,000. Some doctors, including Budoff, recommend estrogen combined with progesterone, the other hormone regulating the menstrual cycle Dr. Budoff reports no increased risk of uterine cancer with this treatment.

Though treatment is available, the causes of hot flashes remain cloaked in mystery. A research study at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, is conducting a study on how the body's temperature-regulating system can control hot flashes. To measure physiological changes during a hot flash, the researchers recruited women who were having frequent attacks.

Hot Flashes