One minute you’re sitting at dinner with friends, chatting happily, and the next you’re drenched with sweat and you feel like a furnace. The good news is that we can turn down the heat through hormone replacement therapy.
You look forward to not dealing with your periods after menopause, but the transition through the end of your reproductive years can be a bumpy one, with side effects ranging from hot flashes to a decline in sexual health.
If you find yourself fine one moment and sweating like you’ve just run a marathon the next, you’re not alone. In fact, three-quarters of women experience hot flashes and night sweats during perimenopause and menopause.
To help turn down the heat, Dr. Hasib Mikael Sarij and the team here at Evolve Medical offer hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which is the most effective approach for reducing hot flashes.
Behind the heat
It’s not until you start losing your reproductive hormones, namely estrogen and progesterone, that you realize just how influential they are. As you transition through perimenopause and then menopause and your hormone levels drop off, you can experience anything from moodiness and weight gain to hot flashes and night sweats.
Hot flashes and night sweats are really the same thing, and they occur because of faulty body heat regulation. More specifically, your hypothalamus — the area of your brain that controls body heat — becomes more sensitive after the loss of estrogen. As a result, it may register that you’re too warm, with even a small temperature change, and initiate a hot flash in an attempt to dispel the heat and regulate your internal temperature.
How hormones can help
Since hormone loss is behind the hot flashes, replacing the lost hormones can help remedy this side effect.
To give you an idea about how successful HRT is in reducing hot flashes, the North American Menopause Society reports that, “Hormone therapy is the most effective treatment for menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes.”
To reduce menopausal symptoms like hot flashes, we turn to systemic replacement of your reproductive hormones, which we can deliver through injections, patches, oral pills, or slow-release pellets that we place under your skin.
What we mean by systemic is that we introduce the replacement hormones into your bloodstream rather than using spot hormonal treatments, such as vaginal estrogen creams, which only address a confined area.
Choosing which delivery method is best for your replacement hormones comes down to personal preference. Many of our clients love the ease of use of hormone pellets. After we insert them, they go to work for 3-4 months, and you don’t need to do anything.
As an added bonus, HRT, in all its forms, can also help with other side effects of menopause, including vaginal dryness, bone loss, loss of energy, and more.
If hot flashes and night sweets are having an impact on your quality of life, call our Deer Park, New York, office at (631) 253-1313 or book an appointment online to see if hormone replacement therapy can help you.
