Tuesday, August 12, 2008

a blessing in disguise?

I have been tracking my hot flashes, rather loosely, but trying to pick up on triggers and such. While the hot flashes are noticeable but bearable, what is really driving me crazy is the memory loss. Take the other day for example: I went upstairs to get X, got upstairs, looked at Y, found Z, and went back downstairs. Remembered X, went back upstairs, found T and W, went back downstairs. I did this five times. In 22 minutes. On the fifth time I wrote down X so I wouldn't forget when I got upstairs. Seriously. But funny, after the fact!

I came across this interesting little ditty today on the SparkPeople.com site:

"Women Don't Notice 40% of Their Hot Flashes
Lack of sleep, causing memory problems, likely culprits in finding," study says

THURSDAY, June 26 (HealthDay News) -- Women tend to miss almost half their menopause-related hot flashes, which are associated with memory problems, according to a University of Illinois at Chicago study that included 29 women with moderate to severe hot flashes.

The women wore monitors that measured skin changes during a hot flash. Both subjective (self-reported) and objective (detected by the monitor) hot flashes were recorded over 24 hours. The average number of objective hot flashes was 19.5 per day, about 40 percent more than were reported by the women.

The researchers also measured the women's memory. Previous research has shown that about 40 percent of middle-aged women report forgetfulness.

'When we looked at the relationship between the hot flashes that the women truly had -- that is, the hot flashes that the monitor picked up -- and memory performance on the cognitive tests, we found a very strong relationship. So, the more true hot flashes a woman had, the worse her memory performance,' lead author Pauline Maki, an associate professor of psychiatry and psychology, said in a prepared statement.

'In other words, the hot flash-memory relationship is not all in a woman"

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