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• Posted November 4, 2024

More Hot Flashes Could Mean Higher Odds for Type 2 Diabetes

Menopausal women with frequent hot flashes and night sweats are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes, a new study warns.

Middle-aged women who regularly suffer those well-known symptoms of menopause are 50% more likely to wind up with type 2 diabetes, researchers reported recently in the journal JAMA Network Open.

“There’s a growing body of evidence that women who have these severe symptoms seem to have something else going on as well, in terms of health risks,” said lead investigator Monique Hedderson, a research scientist with the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. “We need to do more research into understanding what is causing it.”

For the study, researchers analyzed data from more than 2,700 women participating in a long-term national study on women’s health in the United States.

The women were around typical menopause age when first recruited in the mid-1990s, between 42 and 52, and they have been followed for about 17 years.

About 28% of the women reported menopause symptoms on one to five days during a two-week period, and 10% reported symptoms six or more days a week.

Women with persistent hot flashes and night sweats -- also known as vasomotor symptoms -- had a 50% increased risk of developing diabetes, researchers found.

“These findings add to the coalescing research about the importance of vasomotor symptoms to women’s cardiometabolic health, particularly when those symptoms are experienced over long periods of time,” said senior researcher Rebecca Thurston, director of the Center for Women’s Biobehavioral Health at the University of Pittsburgh. “Is a hot flash just a hot flash?”

Although there’s no clear explanation how these symptoms would increase diabetes risk, researchers noted there’s evidence that links hot flashes and night sweats to increased risk of heart disease.

Heart disease sometimes goes hand-in-hand with diabetes risk, as both conditions feature inflammation, poor sleep quality and increased weight, the researchers noted.

“Menopause has been historically understudied,” Hedderson said in a Kaiser Permanente news release. “More research is needed to clarify the mechanism underlying vasomotor symptoms and why -- when frequent and severe -- they associate with adverse health risk.”

Future research should focus on those women with more severe hot flashes and night sweats, the team said.

“While 70% of women will experience vasomotor symptoms at some time during the menopause transition, we’re talking about the smaller proportion of women for whom this is a common and severe problem,” Hedderson said.

They also plan to look at links between menopause symptoms and other health issues.

“One of our next steps is to look at vasomotor symptoms in relationship to other outcomes, such as cognition,” Hedderson said.

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more about menopause.

SOURCE: Kaiser Permanente, news release, Oct. 31, 2024