Red Hot Mamas by Colette Dowling

Author:Colette Dowling [Dowling, Colette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79692-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

HOT FLASH BLUES

HOT flashes are the notorious outward sign of estrogen drop-off. Some women never have a hot flash, some may be only moderately inconvenienced by the symptom, and some may find cataclysms of temperature change wrecking their sleep and embarrassing them as they try to negotiate corporate buyouts. Researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles found that most hot flashes in a group of women they studied occurred at night, often causing waking. The menopausal women awoke three times as often as the premenopausal women and experienced far less REM sleep—the type necessary for genuine rest. As a result, the UCLA team concluded, menopausal women are more likely to be sleep-deprived.

In those of us who are disturbed by the onset of hot flashes, the question immediately arises, “If I do nothing to stop them, for how long will they continue?” For the majority of women (65 percent) hot flashes occur over a period of one to five years. Another 25 percent have them for six to ten years. Ten percent have hot flashes for ten years or more. For a few—”a significant minority,” according to Fredi Kronenberg, Ph.D., a researcher at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons—they last twenty or more years. (Dr. Philip M. Sarrel reported having seen one woman in her seventies and another in her nineties suffering from sleep disturbances due to hot flashes.)

Kronenberg is one of the world’s experts on hot flashes. I heard her speak at a menopause conference, where midlife women were hanging from the rafters in the ballroom of a Ramada Inn in Kingston, New York. Kronenberg was vivid on the subject of flashes. During one, she said, the heart rate can increase as much as twenty-five beats a minute. The body temperature actually falls, because the body is getting rid of heat.

The hypothalamus of the brain controls heart rate, dilation of blood vessels and capillaries and breathing—so-called vasomotor symptoms. A hot flash occurs when the hypothalamus gets its signals mixed. Mistakenly perceiving body temperature as too high, it abruptly triggers cool-down mechanisms. Thus, at the beginning of a hot flash the skin becomes cold and clammy.

The cause of this sudden downward “resetting” of the body’s thermostat is unknown. It’s assumed that estrogen plays a major role in it, since hot flashes begin around menopause, when estrogen levels drop. The abrupt onset of flashes when ovaries are removed surgically, as well as the relief from flashes with estrogen, appear to support the argument. Still, the exact role of estrogen in this peculiar experience of temperature dysregulation isn’t understood.

Considered “severe” are flashes that happen every hour. Four million American women fall into the once-an-hour category, Kronenberg told us. She witnesses a lot of severe flashers because she sees the phenomenon as frequently as possible in order to study it. “I screen very carefully because I don’t want to wait twenty-four hours for a flash. As a result, I have a very good group of flashers.”

One of the subjects, Kronenberg said,

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