Intensive steroid and protein hormone profiles on post-menopausal women experiencing hot flushes, and a group of controls

Abstract

Post-menopausal women tend to be regarded in scientific studies as a homogeneous group and there is little information, certainly as far as plasma hormones are concerned, on comparative data between patients with and without vasomotor symptoms. Furthermore, we are unaware of any data on changes in plasma levels of steroid or protein hormones in such patients over a period of 24 hours and most studies have tended to regard values from single samples as representative of a whole 24-hour period. For this reason we present here 24-hour plasma steroid and protein hormone profiles on seven post-menopausal women with hot flushes and four age-matched controls who had no vasomotor symptoms. It was hoped to determine if any differences in the 24-hour profile could be observed between flushing and non-flushing patients and to discover whether or not any correlation could be established between changes in a particular hormone and the occurrence of a hot flush.