How to Manage Sleepless Nights in Menopause?

Hot flashes and night sweats often come with the menopause territory. As if these symptoms weren’t disruptive enough, you may find yourself losing sleep because of them. Not getting enough sleep from menopause symptoms means more than just crankiness the next day. Long-term sleep deprivation decreases your ability to function during everyday activities, and can even lead to other health problems. If hot flashes and night sweats are causing sleepless nights, it’s time to figure out what you can do about it.

What’s Behind Those Menopause Symptoms?

Due to a variety of symptoms, menopause can mean different things for different women. From a medical standpoint, menopause is defined as not having your period for one year. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the average age for menopause is 51 years old. The absence of periods and the influx of menopausal symptoms is attributed to hormonal changes. When you enter menopause, your ovaries produce less estrogen and progesterone.

Hot flashes and night sweats are the most common menopause symptoms. Estrogen is the culprit here. The ACOG estimates that 75 percent of perimenopausal women experience hot flashes. Signs of hot flashes and accompanying night sweats include:

• red, blushing skin (especially on the face)
• feelings of hotness, even in cool temperatures
• drenching sweat during times of inactivity
• inability to focus due to general discomfort

Hot flashes can happen more than once a day, and they strike without warning. The symptoms can also occur during perimenopause. This is the time leading up to menopause, when your periods start becoming more and more irregular.

When Menopause Disrupts Sleep

Hot flashes from menopause can be so intense that they interrupt normal activities. In fact, it’s not uncommon for women to lose sleep over them. To make matters worse, hot flashes and subsequent night sweats can last for several minutes at a time. You may find yourself waking up more than once a night, and unable to find relief for long periods of time. When you can’t sleep, other health problems can arise. Over the long-term, a regular lack of sleep can cause:

• slowed metabolism
• weight gain
• anxiety
• high blood pressure
• heart problems

You Can Get a Good Night’s Sleep

The key for your health (and for your sanity) is to get those sleepless nights under control. Given the frequency and intensity of hot flashes and night sweats, such a task may seem impossible. Success in getting sleep is dependent on a combination of lifestyle changes as well as the possibility of medical intervention.

You can help reduce hot flashes at night by:

• not taking daytime naps
• avoiding alcohol
• reducing caffeine intake (and avoiding it at night)
• eat small dinners
• exercising every day

Also, it goes without saying that you want to keep your bedroom as cool as possible. During the cold winter months, this can be challenging, especially if you sleep in the same bed as your partner. Try dressing in layers and use several small. Lightweight blankets instead of one heavy comforter. Keep shades drawn during the day to prevent your room heating from the sun.

Lifestyle changes can help minimize night sweats from hot flashes. While hot flashes may also be minimized, hormone therapy can help prevent them. Among the options are:

• estrogen-only therapy
• combined estrogen-progestin
• prescription antidepressants

Hormone therapy is not for everyone, but if you suffer from severe sleep deprivation, it may be time to consider how medications can help combat nighttime hot flashes. Talk to your doctor about the benefits versus any risks. With a little work, you can be on your way to better sleep without all of the heat and sweat of menopause.

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Source - http://menopausechitchat.com/2014/06/hot-flashes-and-night-sweats-keeping-you-awake-how-to-manage-sleepless-nights-in-menopause.html

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New Clues Why Breast Cancer Still A Menopause Risk

It is not just your hormones that change at menopause, it seems that as women age the cells responsible for maintaining healthy breast tissue stop responding to their immediate surroundings, including mechanical cues that should prompt them to suppress nearby tumours.

These new findings are attributed to scientists from the US Department of Energy’s National Laboratory at Berkeley and the University of Bergen, Norway.  Their work sheds light on how aging alters cellular and molecular functions, and how these changes contribute to the prevalence of breast cancer in older women.

Who is at risk?

The disease is most frequently diagnosed among women aged 55 to 64 according to the National Cancer Institute and of course if you have a family link through the maternal line you will be more susceptible.
Two years ago the same scientists found that as women age, multipotent progenitors accumulate in breast epithelial tissue. They didn’t know why these cells increase in numbers, but they believed their cellular microenvironment — or the matrix of tissue surrounding them — plays a role. To explore this idea, the scientists examined human mammary epithelial cell samples from pre and post-menopausal women.

They found that breast tissue from women less than 30 years old is extremely responsive to changes to their immediate surroundings.  The tissue responded to any stiffness by producing a defence  mechanism of tumor suppressants.  This natural response to change was not however seen in tissue from women older than 55. Instead of responding to the stiffness by upping the production of tumor-suppressing cells, multipotent progenitors from older women produced equal amounts of luminal and tumor-suppressing cells. That’s bad for a couple of reasons. The majority of cancers diagnosed in older women are luminal, and more multipotent progenitors means more cells that can become cancerous.

They found that as women age, multipotent progenitors, which are the cells responsible for maintaining healthy homeostasis in breast tissue, no longer respond to their microenvironment like they do in younger women. Older tissue does not correctly perceive differentiation cues, such as the mechanical stiffness of their surroundings.

The scientists traced this failure to a breakdown in a cellular process. The process converts external mechanical cues, in this case the stiffness of the tissue outside of the cell membrane, into an internal molecular message that tells the cell nucleus what to do.  In multipotent progenitors in women older than 55, the molecules that help deliver this message are inefficiently activated, and they believe this breakdown stems from changes in the way women’s genes are activated and silenced as they grow older.


How to reduce your risk?

Hormone balance is key here, so dealing with oestrogen dominance and rebalancing with progesterone to oppose the excess oestrogen is the best place to start. Next are lifestyle changes, as at menopause the more weight you have, the more fat cells there are to produce oestrogen so again maintaining a healthy weight is essential to reduce your risk.

One study has shown that in a study of two groups of breast cancer survivors who were considered obese or overweight the group who received weight loss and exercise counselling after six months, women in the weight loss counselling group experienced an approximate 30% decrease in C-reactive protein (CRP) levels compared with the group who received no counselling.

CRP is a marker of chronic inflammation and higher CRP levels have been associated with a higher risk of breast cancer mortality. The women who lost at least 5% body weight experienced an approximate 22% decrease in insulin, 38% decrease in leptin, and 55% decrease in CRP, compared to significantly less biomarker improvement in women who lost less than 5% body weight.

Diet alone is not enough, exercise is also a key component as a similar story applies to exercise where participants were randomised into two groups — those who participated in twice-weekly strength training and 2.5 hr/wk of moderate-intensive aerobic exercise — and those who did no exercise (control group). After 12 months, the study found that the exercise group experienced an approximate 3% weight and body fat loss, and 6% decrease in CRP levels compared to increases in the control group.

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Source - http://www.bio-hormone-health.com/2014/06/16/new-clues-why-breast-cancer-still-a-menopause-risk/

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