Botanicals Have No Effect on Hot Flashes or Cognition: Study
[Writer] This is research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Today, Pauline Maki, associate professor of psychiatry and psychology, talks about two UIC studies in the journal Menopause that looked at the effects of botanical therapies on hot flashes and memory in menopausal women.
Here’s Professor Maki:
[Maki] The main complaint that women have as they transition through the menopause is hot flashes, otherwise known as vasomotor symptoms. The standard of care for women to relieve these hot flashes is hormone therapy. However, about five years ago women began to decrease their use of hormone therapy after hearing reports in the media about negative effects of hormone therapy on their health. Specifically, there was evidence that hormone therapy, at least in older women, led to an increased risk of stroke and breast cancer.
In order to provide women with more information about what alternatives might be available to them to treat these hot flashes, Stacie Geller, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago/Botanical Dietary Supplements Center, conducted a study comparing two alternative treatments for vasomotor symptoms to the standard of care, which is hormone therapy, and to placebo.
The goal of the study was to answer the question, ‘Do commonly used botanical therapies show efficacy in terms of reducing hot flashes when compared to placebo and when compared to an active treatment, which is hormone therapy?’
The results of the study showed that, as expected, hormone therapy significantly reduced the number of hot flashes that women experienced. However, neither of the botanicals, which were red clover and black cohosh, had an effect on vasomotor symptoms. In other words, only hormone therapy proved to be effective.
The good news from the study, however, since a number of women throughout the United States and across the world use these alternative botanical therapies, is that neither red clover nor black cohosh had any negative effects on a number of different safety outcomes. There was no negative effect on the breast and no negative effect on the uterus. So this is good news. Unfortunately, we still need to conduct future studies in order to identify safe and effective alternative therapies for vasomotor symptoms.
In an adjunct study, we investigated whether those botanic treatments had an effect on cognitive abilities in women. When women transition through the menopause they have memory complaints and recent evidence demonstrates that they show impairments when given memory tests as they transition through the menopause. So we wanted to know, does hormone therapy or these botanic therapies have an effect on cognitive function.
The results of our study over a one year period of time, like the main trial, demonstrated that none of the botanicals had a beneficial effect on memory, nor did they have a detrimental effect. So red clover and black cohosh were neutral to memory.
However, consistent with previous studies, hormone therapy in the form of Prempro had a negative effect on memory; a small one, but a statistically significant negative effect on memory.
Together, these two studies demonstrate that compared to botanicals, only hormone therapy had a beneficial effect on vasomotor symptoms, but this benefit was at a slight decrease in memory. In future studies we need to identify a safe and effective treatment for hot flashes that’s either neutral or beneficial to memory functioning and that is the focus of ongoing trials at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
[Writer] Pauline Maki is associate professor of psychiatry and psychology.
For more information about this research, go to www.today.uic.edu, click on “news releases” and look for the release dated August 6, 2009.
This has been research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
