Brief Number worth knowing · Hot flashes & night sweats
How long do hot flashes last? Often more than 7 years.
7.4 years. That was the median length of frequent hot flashes or night sweats in SWAN, a long-running US observational study of the menopause transition.
Researchers followed 3,302 women at seven US sites from 1996 to 2013. All were 42 to 52 when they joined. This analysis covers the 1,449 who had frequent symptoms, meaning on at least 6 of the previous 14 days, and half of them had those symptoms for longer than 7.4 years. Among the 881 women whose last period could be dated, the symptoms went on for a median of 4.5 years after it.1
When they started made a big difference. Women whose frequent hot flashes began while their periods were still regular, or just starting to change, had them longest: a median of more than 11.8 years. For women whose hot flashes began after menopause, the median was 3.4 years. The medians also differed by race and ethnicity, from 10.1 years for African American women to 4.8 for Japanese women.1
This week: write down when your hot flashes became frequent and what your periods were doing then: regular, changing, or stopped for a year. The study measured exactly that.
Ask your clinician: “If mine could last for years, which options make sense for me, and how often should we look at them again?”
The limitation: SWAN asked once a year about the previous two weeks, so the authors say it may have underestimated how long symptoms last. Women who started hormone therapy were counted only up to that point, and women who had a hysterectomy or both ovaries removed were left out.1
Sources
- Avis NE et al., for the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation. Duration of menopausal vasomotor symptoms over the menopause transition. JAMA Intern Med, 2015. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov