Hot Flashes What Causes Hot Flashes Want Fast Relief?

If you've had one, there's no mistaking it: the sudden, intense, hot feeling on your face and upper body, perhaps preceded or accompanied by a rapid heartbeat and     sweating, nausea, dizziness, anxiety, headache, weakness, or a feeling of suffocation. Some women experience an "aura," an uneasy feeling just before the hot flash, that lets them know what's coming. The flash is followed by a flush, leaving you reddened and perspiring. You can have a soaker or merely a moist upper lip. A chill can lead off the episode or be the finale.

 What causes them

Hot flashes are mostly caused by the hormonal changes of menopause, but can also be affected by lifestyle and medications. A diminished level of estrogen has a direct effect on the hypothalamus, the part of the brain responsible for controlling your appetite, sleep cycles, sex hormones, and body temperature. Somehow (we don't know how), the drop in estrogen confuses the hypothalamus—which is sometimes referred to as the body's "thermostat"—and makes it read "too hot."

The brain responds to this report by broadcasting an all-out alert to the heart, blood vessels, and nervous system: "Get rid of the heat!" The message is transmitted by the nervous system's chemical messenger, epinephrine, and related compounds: norepinephrine, prostaglandin, serotonin. The message is delivered instantly. Your heart pumps faster, the blood vessels in your skin dilate to circulate more blood to radiate off the heat, and your sweat glands release sweat to cool you off even more.

This heat-releasing mechanism is how your body keeps you from overheating in the summer, but when the process is triggered instead by a drop in estrogen, your brain's confused response can make you very uncomfortable. Some women's skin temperature can rise six degrees Centigrade during a hot flash. Your body cools down when it shouldn't, and you are miserable: soaking wet in the middle of a board meeting or in the middle of a good night's sleep.

Who gets them

Eighty-five percent of the women in the United States experience hot flashes of some kind as they approach menopause and for the first year or two after their periods stop. Between 20 and 50% of women continue to have them for many more years. As time goes on, the intensity decreases.

If you have had breast cancer, your hot flashes can follow the same pattern as for women in general, or they can be more intense and last longer, particularly if menopause was premature, or if you are taking tamoxifen and your body hasn't adjusted to it. Rarely, women may not have hot flashes until they stop taking tamoxifen—an unpleasant surprise. In these women, tamoxifen develops an unusual estrogen-like ability to combat hot flashes.

There is considerable variation in time of onset, duration, frequency, and the nature of hot flashes, whether you've had breast cancer or not. An episode can last a few seconds or a few minutes, occasionally even an hour, but it can take another half hour for you to feel yourself again. The most common time of onset is between six and eight in the morning, and between six to ten at night.

How hot is hot?

Most women have mild to moderate hot flashes, but about 10–15% of women experience such severe hot flashes that they seek medical attention. For women who have had breast cancer, the number who suffer debilitating hot flashes is probably much higher. Randomized studies provide the most objective data: about 50–75% of women taking tamoxifen will report hot flashes, compared to 25–50% taking placebo.

The faster you go through the transition from regular periods to no periods—the peri-menopause or climacteric—the more significant your hot flashes will be. Hot flashes are severe after surgical menopause, and they can also be quite difficult after a chemotherapy-induced medical menopause. If you haven't been warned about hot flashes, a sudden severe episode can be frightening; you might even confuse the flash with a heart attack.

The intensity of hot flashes accompanying treatment with tamoxifen eventually improves for many women after the first three to six months. Because of the conversion of androstenedione from the adrenal glands into estrone by fat and muscle cells, heavy or muscular women experience less severe hot flashes than thin women. If you smoke, your blood vessels lose some of their ability to radiate heat, so you may suffer more severe hot flashes.

Beating the heat naturally

The best way to beat a hot flash is naturally. Hot flashes have a lot to do with the low levels of estrogen in your body, but other factors can cause your temperature control to go out of whack. Studies show that medication is not always helpful. Instead of estrogen therapy, look at less drastic measures first, partly because estrogen therapy is not known to be safe for women with a history of breast cancer—but also because you should always begin with the least aggressive approach to treating your menopausal symptoms.

Avoiding triggers

If you can identify the things that trigger your hot flashes, you've made the first step in getting the upper hand. Keep a record of when they occur and what you were eating or doing, or how you were feeling at the time. Many women find that stress tops the charts as a trigger. Was that hot flash in the boardroom a random hit, or were you feeling under pressure at the time? Was it a full day of pressure without a break?

Solution: Ease the pressure. Give yourself more time to plan your work, to rehearse your presentation, to deliver your assignments, to arrive where you're going. If you are doing a series of presentations, give yourself a chance to relax and cool off between sessions. And plan your schedule so you avoid meetings or decision making when you're most likely to be in a sweat.

Other hot flash triggers:

alcohol caffeine diet pills spicy food

hot food hot tubs saunas hot showers

hot beds hot rooms hot weather smoking

Hot flash survival tips

• Dress in layers, so you can peel off one layer after another as you get warmer.
• Don't wear wool, don't wear synthetics, and be wary of silk. That leaves cotton, linen, rayon, and more cotton. (Look at the bright side: You'll save on cleaning bills, and you can stop worrying about moths.)
• Avoid turtlenecks. Stick to open-neck shirts.
• Keep ice water at hand that you can sip to cool down your insides.
• Where possible, lower the thermostat. Maybe it's time for a decent air conditioner or a ceiling fan. Or maybe you'd prefer one of those little hand-held battery-operated fans or the foldable kind you flutter in front of your face. You can find perfectly adequate paper fans for about a dollar.
• Wear cotton pajamas or a nightgown. If you perspire a lot at night, your nightclothes are easier to change than the sheets.
• Use cotton sheets only, not synthetics.
• Get a bigger bed if you and your partner are on different heat planets but you still want to stay in close orbit.
• Take a cool shower before bed.
• Try a mild medication like Tylenol
• Arrive at meetings early so that you can get the coolest seat.
• Use your freezer liberally. A number of women talked about opening the freezer at home (or in the supermarket) and sticking their head in when a hot flash hits.

Lifestyle changes to alleviate hot flashes

Exercise

Increasing your level of activity (for example, taking the stairs instead of the elevator) can reduce hot flashes and have a positive impact on just about every other symptom attributed to menopause and growing older, including:

insomnia mood swings eroded self-image loss of libido

fatigue elevated cholesterol levels heart, bone, and muscle health.

Exercise also increases endorphin levels, increasing your threshold for pain.

Relaxation and stress reduction

It isn't unusual to have trouble dealing with stress, especially if you've undergone treatment for breast cancer. You may find that one of the following techniques will help you minimize the devastating effects of stress on your body:

relaxation exercises breathing exercises meditation visualization

massage hypnosis yoga biofeedback techniques.

Changing your diet

Over time, a low-fat diet helps some women with hot flashes. Losing excess weight helps, but losing too much weight, or being too thin, can worsen symptoms. As you consider other food changes, keep in mind that natural doesn't mean harmless. Herbal remedies and soy preparations may work because of their plant estrogens, but you can't assume that just because an estrogen comes from a plant it's a safe remedy.

Chinese medicine

Chinese medicine has a long tradition of treating hot flashes. There are all kinds of hot flashes, and the Chinese have descriptions for all of them. Before treating you, a Chinese doctor takes a full history and performs a complete physical, with particular attention to your tongue and your pulse. He or she then determines whether you're suffering from a "hot" menopause or a "cold" menopause. If you have gone through a surgical or medical menopause, Chinese herbs are usually not considered strong enough to eliminate your menopausal hot flashes, but they can help.

Chinese medicine usually involves:

• acupuncture, which moves your Xi (your inner wind, energy, or spirit). For every woman who's skeptical about this approach, there's a woman who's found acupuncture helpful for hot flashes.

• herbology, in which many different herbs are cooked together to make a tea customized to your particular symptoms. Common to all Chinese herbal mixes is dong quai, thought to be a plant estrogen. More plant estrogens that women have found effective in treating hot flashes over the centuries can be found in ginseng, evening primrose oil, licorice root, red raspberry leaves, sarsaparilla, spearmint, damiana, motherwort, chasteberry (also known as Vitex), black cohosh, and wild yams. These herbal remedies, Chinese and other, may be effective at reducing hot flashes but, again, their relative safety in women who have had breast cancer is not known. Avoiding, or using plant estrogens with great caution, is best, and never try them without telling your doctor. Even leading Chinese medicine practitioners caution women not to self-treat with Chinese herbs.

Vitamins

Some women find that taking vitamin E every day (800 I.U., range 400–1000) helps. Actually, a placebo works almost as well. The National Cancer Institute's/National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project's Tamoxifen Breast Cancer Prevention Trial also recommends vitamin E, or one of the following: vitamin B6, 200–250 milligrams daily, and Peridin-C (containing antioxidants), two tablets taken three times daily. If vitamin E helps you, great, but if you have significant hot flashes, you will probably need something more effective.

Summary

• The GnRH center effectively signals to increase estrogen and progesterone levels.
  
  

• Elevated estrogen and progesterone inhibit GnRH release.
  
  

• After menopause the ovaries no longer make estrogen and progesterone.
  
  

• Lack of estrogen and progesterone response results in increased activity of the GnRH center.
  
  

• Heightened GnRH activity activates the vasomotor center, causing hot flashes and perspiration.