Four Boston-Based Breakthroughs in Menopause Research

Women’s midlife health is having a long-overdue moment. As social media influencers push perimenopause wonder cures with unprecedented fervor, Boston’s medical community is meanwhile quietly making crucial discoveries. As part of a series from our February issue on menopause, here are four research breakthroughs that happened here.

1. Sleep quality matters.

Sleep during menopause isn’t just about logging enough hours—quality is crucial, too. That’s what Hadine Joffe, executive director of Brigham and Women’s Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology, showed in a study published this past August. “One thing that I think is a major public health message is that menopause-related sleep interruption—waking up repeatedly in the middle of the night—is not good for health,” she says. And “increasing the number of hours in bed isn’t the solution—we need the sleep to be uninterrupted.”

2. A new drug for a hot flash-free future.

Hot flashes may have finally met their (non-hormonal) match. Part of a class of drugs known as neurokinin-3 receptor antagonists, elinzanetant was recently studied by Joffe and other researchers in a phase three clinical trial and shown to decrease the severity of vasomotor symptoms in menopausal women. It’s made by Bayer and is currently under review, but a similar drug by Astellas Pharma, under the brand-name Veozah, was already approved by the FDA and is available to women looking for an alternative to hormone therapy.

3. Vitamins aren’t required.

That daily vitamin habit could be draining your wallet more than boosting your health. In a paper published this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), JoAnn Manson, chief of the division of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s, concluded that while calcium and vitamin D supplements do have a role in filling nutritional gaps for midlife women not meeting dietary guidelines, they should not be used routinely. The bottom line? Consider how much you’re getting of any vitamin through foods before reaching for a bottle of supplements.

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4. Night sweats have side effects.

Those nighttime sweats aren’t just making you toss and turn—they could also be messing with your mind. Joffe and other researchers have found that nocturnal hot flashes can have mental health effects as well. “Even if you’re sleeping through them—we’ve seen that just nighttime hot flashes themselves contribute to bad mood,” she says. It’s one of the reasons, she notes, that they’re “important to treat.”