Did someone say science?

The Menopause Society gets some compelling research for us

Photo by Vlad Panov on Unsplash

Today marks the start of the three-day 2023 Annual Meeting of The Menopause Society of North America.

That means a whole bunch of hot menopause research has been dropping this week and the embargo is lifted… now! It will be interesting to see what mainstream media in North America does with some of this research. I’ll touch on that aspect in my free newsletter this weekend.

I’ve only got access to the previews, but here are some things I found compelling, and why.

Hot flashes are not just hot flashes

One of the studies to be presented this week is the first of its kind to physiologically measure whether hot flashes are connected to systemic inflammation.

And they are.

Looking at 276 women with hot flashes revealed an association with higher levels of C-reactive protein, an important inflammatory marker, even after adjusting for a range of other mitigating factors. (The women are part of the wider National Institutes of Health-funded MsHeart study being conducted at the University of Pittsburgh’s Women's Biobehavioral Health Laboratory.)

Previous research has also found this association, but it’s all been based on less-accurate, subjective self-reporting.

If you are asking yourself how they can just be studying this now, you are not alone. And just to show you the snail’s pace science moves at, and sometimes must move at to establish important foundations, this technology has been around for decades. It’s called sternal skin conductance, and it involves attaching electrodes to the sternum. It has been the subject of dozens of studies since 2002, but they first focused on assessing its effectiveness as a measurement for hot flashes, then moved on to comparing how those objective results stacked up to self-reporting.

Now we are getting to the interesting stuff.