MONDAY, July 12 (Health.com) — Overweight women who experience hot flashes—the uncomfortable flushing and sweating spells that accompany menopause—may be able to cool those symptoms by losing weight, a new study suggests.
“If you’re a woman who is overweight or obese, you can substantially improve your hot flashes by losing weight through diet and exercise,” says Alison Huang, MD, the lead author of the study and a professor of internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
“Weight loss isn’t just something that will benefit your long-term health 10, 20, or 30 years from now,” she adds. “It can make a real difference in your symptoms and quality of life right now.”
Previous research has shown that women with higher body-mass indexes (BMI) tend to experience worse hot flashes. Until now, however, few studies have tried to measure the immediate effect that weight loss has on symptoms.
In the new study, which was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. Huang and her colleagues re-analyzed data from a study that included about 150 overweight and obese menopausal women who were experiencing urinary incontinence as well as troublesome hot flashes.
Roughly two-thirds of the women were assigned to an intensive program designed to help them lose up to 9% of their body weight. The program included at least 40 minutes of moderate exercise per day, a reduced calorie diet (no more than 1,500 calories daily), and weekly counseling sessions that provided nutrition tips.
Six months later, the women who participated in the weight-loss program were more than twice as likely as the women in the control group to have experienced an improvement in their hot flash symptoms.
And it wasn’t enough to just get more exercise or cut calories—only weight loss itself was linked to fewer hot flash symptoms. For each 11 pounds that a woman lost, she was roughly one-third more likely than women who did not lose weight to experience a decline in the severity or frequency of hot flashes.
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