Clinical and endocrinological features of women with climacteric symptoms, who were clustered by means of factor analysis and cluster analysis, were evaluated as to serum concentrations of estradiol, progesterone, follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone, and also as to mean ages as well as a rate of premenopausal women or that of postmenopausal women against all women in each one of the clusters. Comparison of these parameters among these clusters indicated, with statistical significance, that vasomotor symptoms, neurotic symptoms, and depressive state of the climacteric women are endocrinologically characterized by a depressed level of serum estrogen, relatively high level of serum estrogen, and an elevation of serum gonadotropin, particularly of luteinizing hormone, respectively. climacteric symptoms ; estrogen ; gonadotropin ; follicle-stimulating hormone ; luteinizing hormoneThe etiology of climacteric symptoms is still considered to lie in complicated chaos, although many studies have been carried out separately focusing on various aspects such as endocrinological factors, psychosomatic factors, etc. In order to develop a comprehensive approach to the etiology of climacteric symptoms, the authors have undertaken a series of studies of these symptoms ; in our previous report (Abe et al. 1984), statistical factor analysis and cluster analysis were applied to data consisting of sets of 17 symptoms of climacteric women. Six distinct factors were extracted and the women were divided into 7 groups by hierarchical cluster analysis in terms of their factor scores. In the present study, the authors investigated clinical and endocrinological features of these clustered groups of women with climacteric symptoms in order to elucidate etiologies of the
Although climacteric symptoms, particularly, vasomotor symptoms such as hot flushes, have been suggested to correlate with depletion of ovarian estrogen secretion, its precise mechanism to producing these symptoms has still remained unknown. On the other hand, catecholamines have been presumed to be related to an onset of the climacteric symptoms. This study was carried out to elucidate the correlation between the climacteric symptoms and plasma levels of catecholamines. Thirty-eight women complaining of climacteric symptoms were studied. These subjects were evaluated for their symptoms and the severity of the symptoms was expressed in numerical figure, 0 to 3, according to its degrees: none, slight, moderate, and marked, respectively. At the same time venous blood samples were drawn to determine the plasma levels of catecholamines, using an Renzini's fluorimetric assay method improved by Miura. Eventually, a correlation between severities of the symptoms and plasma catecholamines was made. Plasma epinephrine levels were found to be elevated as the severity of the hot flush progressed from none to marked. No symptoms other than hot flush showed such significant correlation with plasma epinephrine or norepinephrine levels. This result suggests that the onset of hot flush is closely related with an increased activity of the adrenomedullary sympathetic nervous system.
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