Chinese herbs may reduce hot flashes

Women taking a Chinese herbal formula experienced less than half the number of menopausal hot flashes they had before the treatment, according to a new study from Hong Kong.

Among women taking an herbal mix called Er-xian decoction (EXD), the frequency of daily hot flashes dropped by 62 percent, compared to a 52-percent drop seen among women taking a placebo.

"It's a modest effect, but not a zero effect," said Katherine Newton, a researcher who has studied herbal menopause therapies at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle.

Newton, who was not involved in the research, said she'd want to see more, long-term studies demonstrating that these herbs are safe before she would recommend them to women, but that the current study makes EXD look promising as an alternative menopause treatment.

Hormone replacement therapy is considered the most effective therapy for menopause-related symptoms, but potential health risks from hormones have women looking for alternatives, said Yao Tong, a professor at the University of Hong Kong and one of the authors of the new study.

Er-xian decoction (EXD) contains compounds extracted from the roots, stems or leaves of six Chinese herbs, processed into granules then packaged in sachets to be made into a tea.

Although previous studies have found that EXD can help reduce hot flashes, they were not high quality experiments, the researchers write in the medical journal Menopause: The Journal of The North American Menopause Society.

To get a more reliable assessment of how well EXD works, they asked 101 women in their 40s and 50s, who were at or near menopause and experiencing symptoms, to drink an herbal formula twice a day for 12 weeks.

Half of the women drank a 15 gram dose of EXD, while the other half drank a fake remedy that consisted of tea, caramel and an herbal compound called gardenin.

For two weeks prior to the treatment, the women logged their hot flashes.

Those in the EXD group reported an average of 5.8 hot flashes each day, and those in the other group experienced five daily.

After the treatment, the number of hot flashes dropped to 2.2 in the EXD group and 2.5 in the other group.

Three months after the treatment ended, hot flashes stayed put at 2.2 a day for women who had drank EXD, while they went up slightly to 2.9 a day for women who had drank the placebo.

"Menopausal flushing is notoriously responsive to fluctuations and placebo responses in clinical trials, yet they have rigorously demonstrated an improvement in favor of active treatment" with Er-xian decoction, said Dr. Alan Bensoussan, the director of the Centre for Complementary Medicine Research at the University of Western Sydney, in an email to Reuters Health.

The severity of the hot flashes also declined to a greater degree in the EXD group, from a three out of four at the beginning of the study to a 1.6 at the end.