Matted
Ladies – get your mats ready!
Research suggests that yoga is actually superior to physical exercise for relieving vasomotor symptoms (e.g. hot flashes and sleep disturbances) perceived stress and neuroticism in perimenopausal women.
The new study, published in the journal Menopause, compared the effects of 8 weeks of simple, trainer-supervised physical exercise to integrated yoga (sun salutation with 12 postures, breathing practices and cyclic meditation) in 120 perimenopausal women.
Positive, significant benefits were seen in all measures among women who were part of the yoga versus the physical exercise group.
Yoga appears to be a wonderful way to relieve some of the more troublesome menopausal symptoms without medication. I wouldn’t give up any physical exercise that you engage in but adding a yoga component to your routine may be provide some additional benefits.
Yoga classes are offered throughout the country in local gyms, specialized centers and often through the local YMCA or YWCA. If you’ve never participated in a class, you can learn more about the practice of yoga at the following sites:
- The American Yoga Association offers a great introduction to yoga
- The Iyengar Yoga National Association of the United States also has some well-written content on their website, and oversees instructor certification. They may be a good resource for finding an instructor
- Yogajournal.com is a great resource for videos, teachers, community, blogs, etc. and a wonderful place to get started
Finally, I just want to mention that that is not me in the photo. If I were ever able to get into that position, it might take me months to get out of it!
Read MoreTropical Vacation
My friend Sissy sent me this awesome tea towel a few months ago.
This weekend I’m leaving town. Thought I’d bring along litte umbrellas for my drinks just in case I end up in tropical paradise.
p.s. Wendy got me this towel (see comments). I guess that my memory is starting to go. Sorry Wen!!!!
Read MoreHaving a hot flash?
Why not try a cleavage cooler? I ran across this nifty product this afternoon.
All you do is take the paks, stick ’em in the freezer and then tote them around. When a hot flash hits, you simply take out a cooler pak and shove it in your bra. Voila! Instant cooling.
I think that the last thing I think I’d desire is an ice pack in my bra. Sort of like rubber chickens for the menopausal set, right?!
Read MoreNews flash! A new alternative alternative therapy!
As promised in my post last week, I tracked down Denise Polacek, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Life Quality Technologies to learn more about the device for hot flashes that she is developing. We chatted about how and why she invented the product and more importantly, what it means for women in menopause who for one reason or another, don’t want to take hormone replacement therapy.
Her background? Denise has not spent her lifetime as a career inventor but she has spent years in a field called technology transfer (assisting scientists with patenting and commercial licensing of inventions). So she understands the ins and outs of development. What’s more, she has a broad scientific research background and a few patents under her belt already, although she says that these are based in cardiovascular genomics and not targeted to her current interests.
No stranger to hot flashes, a few years ago Denise found herself attacking the thermostat in meetings every time her internal thermostat rose a degree. “After about the fifth time, a colleague pulled me aside and suggested that the problem was me,” she explained. “So, I went to the gynecologist and immediately started hormone replacement therapy.”
While the hot flashes stopped within 24 hours, her interest in research didn’t. She felt that if she was going to take hormones, she better understand what she was taking. While delving deeper into the published literature, she learned about the association between HRT and incidence of blood clots and heart attacks. The cost-benefit ratio was not worth it, she says. So she stopped the drugs immediately. And became a guinea pig for her own experimentation with thermoelectric cooling.
Denise likens her own patented invention to a cooling fan in a computer; when the compressor starts overheating, the fan kicks in. She says that she soon realized that as soon as she got into the cold, her hot flashes would stop and that she could attenuate the symptoms within seconds. “I used those blue ice paks commonly reserved for injuries,” she says. And by experimenting on different parts of the body, she discovered that certain areas were more sensitive to cold than others and could literally halt the flash in a very short period of time.
Although the new device does not have a name or a final design as of yet, there is a prototype that’s been tested successfully on numerous colleagues. The results thus far have been exciting. “Cooling is mostly immediate and instantaneous” she says.
Denise expects the yet unnamed device to be on the market sometime in 2009. She emphasizes that the final product will be lightweight, portable, discreet, and worn under clothing near the waistline, “like lingerie.”
This is a lady who was not afraid to take some risks and follow her own path when the path in front of her has too many potholes. She’s networked like crazy and her efforts are paying off – not just for herself but those perimenopausal and menopausal women for whom drugs are not the answer. Denise told me that while she has a few other ideas for her new company, she is first and foremost dedicated to menopausal women and breast cancer sufferers plunged into premature menopause. “Menopause is not a disease,” she says, and “shouldn’t be treated like one.”
The possibilities are endless. And here’s a new pioneer who’s created innovative solution for millions of women who suffer from hot flashes. Cool!
Read MoreOm
Can meditation ease hot flashes? Dr. James Carmody, an assistant professor in the Division of Preventive and Behaviorial Medicine at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine, has conducted research that suggests it can.
This small study enrolled 15 women experiencing at least 7 moderate to severe hot flashes daily to test the hypothesis that stress and hot flashes are linked. For 7 weeks, study participants attended mindfulness-based stress reduction classes that included meditation and kept a daily hot flash log during and 4 weeks after classes ended. Participants were also evaluated for menopause-related quality of life before the start and after the conclusion of mindfulness classes. The results? There was a 40% decline in weekly average hot flash severity and quality of life increased significantly.
Dr. Carmody evidently believes in these findings so much that he is currently recruiting hot flashers for a larger clinical study.
Meanwhile, I ran across this guided meditation for hot flashers on the web.
Read MoreCool!
Hey Hot flashers! Big news! I mean really big!
I just read an article extolling the virtues of a new device in development that claims to “beat the heat of a hot flash.” Denise Polacek, PhD, founder of Life Quality Technologies, has designed a wearable device the size of a heart monitor that will track temperature on the surface of your skin and then automatically turn on a thermoelectric cooler when you need it. This is welcome news for those of you who don’t want to do the HRT shuffle. I don’t know much else but I’m going to try to track this story a bit deeper and see if I can locate Denise for an interview.
In the meantime, no surprise but evidently a hot flash heats up the skin by 1.5 degrees F in just 30 seconds. Yikes! No wonder we’re all sweating!
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