The study, published in the journal Menopause on Wednesday, also suggests that women with a history of hypertension during pregnancy who use hormone therapy are more likely to report more bothersome symptoms than women with no such history.
“The hypertensive pregnancy did not cause a woman to have more hot flashes, and the hot flashes will not cause heart disease,” said Faubion, who worked on the study.
“We are beginning to understand that women have these unique things that they experience, that can place them in a different category for risk of heart disease and finding that two of them seem to link to each other was an interesting finding,” she said, adding, “We know that hormone therapy reduces or eliminates hot flashes. We do not know if that changes the risk.”
Hypertension during pregnancy and menopausal symptoms
The new study included data from the medical records of 2,684 women between the ages of 40-65 who reported being near menopause as postmenopausal during consultations at the Mayo Clinic’s women’s health campuses in Rochester, Minnesota, and Scottsdale, Arizona, between 2015 and 2019.
The Mayo researchers analyzed these data, and took a close look at each woman’s history of pregnancy and menopausal symptoms.
They found that 18.7% of women who had never been pregnant and close to 20% of those with no history of hypertension during pregnancy reported having severe or very severe hot flashes.
And more than 23% of women who had a history of high blood pressure during pregnancy reported having severe as well as very hot flashes.
The researchers found that 7.8% of women who used hormone replacement therapy who had no history of pregnancy reported hard or very heavy flashes. Among women on HRT, 13.8% of those who did not have hypertension during pregnancy had bad hot flashes.
But women who took HRT and who also had high blood pressure during pregnancy had the highest risk of severe hot flashes: 27% of them.
‘We used to think of hot flashes as temporary and benevolent … neither are they.’
Most of the women in the study were White, committed and had partners. More research is needed to determine whether similar findings would occur among a more diverse group of women. Some of the information on the history of women’s hypertension during pregnancy and menopausal symptoms was self-reported and is therefore subject to memory bias.
Even though more research is needed, Faubion said the new findings help shed light on what severe menopausal symptoms may mean for some women.
“Women who are having a rough time in menopause with a lot of hot flashes have to say, ‘You know what – could this be a little more than just an nuisance?'” Faubion said.
“We used to think hot flashes were temporary and benign, but now we’re finding out they are not one,” she said. “Hot flashes last an average of seven to nine years and for a third of women last a decade or more, and we also learn that they are not so benign, that they are associated with some risk.”
This is not the first time that a link has been found between hypertension during pregnancy and certain symptoms of menopausal symptoms.
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