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Menopausal complaints in women -and men!

December 20, 2002

Men can also evince menopausal complaints. As many as one third of a group of men over the age of 55 reported that they experienced sweating and hot flashes, according to a researcher at Linköping University in Sweden. Another member of the same research team has found that acupuncture often alleviates women’s menopausal symptoms.

The research team is connected with the Section for Obstetrics and gynecology. Two of these scientists have submitted doctoral dissertations: Yvonne Wyon, who has studied acupuncture for female menopausal symptoms, and Anna-Clara Spetz, who has studied similar problems in men. Both dissertations also include studies of a vessel-expanding peptide called CGRP. This seems to be involved in the emergence of sweating and hot flashes in women, and perhaps also in men. Yvonne Wyon and her supervisor Professor Mats Hammar were among the first in the world to make this discovery, which may lead to a new way of treating menopausal complaints.

Anna-Clara Spetz’s dissertation includes a questionnaire sent to more than 1800 men over the age of 55. The responses indicate that one third of the men experienced sweating and hot flashes, and that half of these men found them troublesome. She also discovered a correlation between sweating/hot flashes and symptoms that are seen as being associated with low levels of testosterone in the blood, for example, reduced muscle strength, diminished stamina, deteriorated quality of life, and low spirits. Anna-Clara Spetz has also compared two different castration methods for men with prostate cancer: estrogen treatment vs. surgery or other types of medically potent castration treatment. Estrogen treatment entailed far fewer problems with sweating and hot flashes. The method works equally well in terms of survival and effect on the prostate cancer, whereas possible side-effects are still being examined.

The other Linköping doctor, Yvonne Wyon, has studied acupuncture in the treatment of women’s menopausal complaints. Roughly one fifth of the women studied did not respond at all to acupuncture, but the others reduced their discomforts by about 75 percent. This is a lower figure than for estrogen treatment, which reduced complaints by about 90 percent, but it is high enough to be a viable alternative for women who either do not want to or should not use estrogen (women who have had breast cancer or run a hereditary risk of developing it, for example).

Vetenskapsrådet (The Swedish Research Council)