Donna Adams-Pickett, PhD, MD, FACOG, discusses how vasomotor symptoms — such as sleep disturbances and fluctuating body temperature — may be treated without hormone therapy by targeting dysregulation of KNDy neurons.
She also explains the link between vasomotor symptoms and cardiovascular health, noting that Black women often experience more severe menopausal symptoms, which may contribute to an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease.
Temperature regulation and sleep disturbances — there are ways that we can address them without approaching the use of hormones, because we now know that we can approach the KNDy complex, and by approaching them, we can control those two sets of symptoms.
It’s very important that we understand why vasomotor symptoms can differ in terms of their presentation when we’re looking at ethnicity.
Black women tend to experience vasomotor symptoms sooner and for longer. So Black women tend to have vasomotor symptoms in their late 30s, early 40s, and they can last for up to 10 years, from whenever they start. In other ethnicities, particularly white women, we notice that those vasomotor symptoms start a little later and they tend to only last about 6.5 years, and so that’s a significant difference. And one thing we have learned in our research is that the severity of vasomotor symptoms can be closely related to cardiac health.
We find that the more severe vasomotor symptoms are, the more we start having disturbances in cardiac rhythm and cardiac function. So, if African American women are having more severe symptoms and for longer, they’re more vulnerable to cardiovascular compromise.
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