- Feb 9, 2001
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"Sarah Finney, 57, said she gets hot flashes throughout her body at least once an hour. She even wakes up in the night with so much perspiration that she looks like she just left working out at a gym, she said.
“Hot flashes are very annoying,” said Finney, a married mother of two who declined to use her real name. “A surge of heat goes through my body, sometimes accompanied by nausea. As the energy builds, I begin to sweat from my hair, neck, chest and underarms.”
Finney, a vegetarian, said she hoped eating healthy and her intense daily routines as a marathon runner would alleviate the symptoms, but no luck.
Finney, who lives in Alexandria, Va., is experiencing the results of menopause, a natural decline in reproductive hormones that affects millions of woman annually when they reach their 40s or 50s.
ALERT: For women going through menopause, just one day of hot flashes can be too much. Imagine 14 years. A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, a medical journal of the American Medical Association, found that women could experience hot flashes for up to 14 years, and that African-American women like Finney typically experience the symptoms longer.
Finney has been going through it for 10 years.
The 17-year study of 1,449 women across the U.S. found that while on average, the women endured the symptoms for about seven and a half years, Black and Hispanic women experience hot flashes for significantly longer than White or Asian women. The median was 10 years for African Americans, nearly nine years for Hispanics, six and a half years for White women, about five and a half years for Chinese and nearly five years for Japanese."
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