By: Elaine Gottlieb for Fibroids1Stressed by hot flashes or other menopausal symptoms? Try lacing up your sneakers and taking a walk. A new study has found that exercise can relieve symptoms and improve quality of life for menopausal women.
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Incorporate more physical activity into your daily routine – you can start slowly and gradually increase your activity level. Try walking for a comfortable length of time and increase by five minutes until you are taking five 30-minute walks a week, the recommended amount for health benefits.
Check out yoga classes in your area; the study showed yoga in particular to have sexual benefits.
Learn more about menopause: read “The Wisdom of Menopause” by Christiane Northrup or “Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause” by The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. |
The study, which was reported in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, compared 164 sedentary or low-active menopausal women who began a walking program or practiced yoga with a third group who maintained their usual routine. The average age of the women in the study was 50 and they were followed for four months.
The Penn State researchers report that about half of the active women reported improvements in their perceived quality of life, and fewer symptoms. The improvement in symptoms is attributed to greater cardio-respiratory fitness. Regular exercise also helped to reduce their stress and anxiety.
“I’ve seen so many menopausal patients who’ve taken up exercise and yoga and report lovely improvements in symptoms,” says Alice Domar, Ph.D., founder and executive director of the Domar Center for Complementary Healthcare in Waltham, MA, which focuses exclusively on women’s health issues, and head of mind body services at Boston IVF.
A key finding of the study is the change in women’s perceptions of their symptoms when they exercise. Perception affects how patients respond to an ongoing health issue, such as chronic pain. “If a patient reports improvement, that means the patient has improvement. Anything you can do to bring down the stress level should ease menopausal symptoms. We know exercise affects hormone levels and walking induces relaxation,” says Domar.
The median age for menopause (which is defined as the cessation of menstrual periods for one year) in American women is 52. Some women reach this transition as young as 40 and others as late as 58.
For years hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was the recommended treatment for menopausal symptoms, particularly hot flashes. That changed in 2002 when a Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study of HRT was suddenly stopped when it was found that taking hormones was increasing the risk of coronary disease, stroke and blood clots. HRT use has dropped dramatically in the ensuing years and, according to a study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, so has the overall incidence of breast cancer, which has gone down by 8.6 percent in postmenopausal women.
In light of this dramatic data, “I can’t imagine gynecologists are going to be comfortable prescribing HRT except for very short periods of time,” says Domar. “There’s no truly safe pill for menopause.”
In addition to exercise, other natural approaches can make a difference. Limiting caffeine, alcohol and spicy foods can help reduce hot flashes. Domar recommends acupuncture and relaxation and cognitive techniques but not herbs, such as black cohosh, which have not been shown to be effective in research studies.
Menopause can be an impetus for paying greater attention to your overall health and making positive changes. “Women who are physically active have an easier time [with menopause]. And health conscious women figure out pretty quickly what makes them feel better,” she says.
