Childhood abuse and vasomotor symptoms among midlife women

Abstract

Objective: Childhood maltreatment is related to adverse health outcomes. However, the relation of childhood maltreatment to the menopause transition—a universal transition for women often accompanied by troubling symptoms such as vasomotor symptoms—is relatively underexplored. This study tested whether childhood abuse and neglect are associated with menopausal vasomotor symptoms, utilizing both physiologic and prospective self-report measures of vasomotor symptoms. Methods: In all, 295 nonsmoking perimenopausal and postmenopausal women aged 40 to 60 years with and without vasomotor symptoms completed psychosocial measures, including the Child Trauma Questionnaire, ambulatory physiologic (sternal skin conductance) and self-report measurement of vasomotor symptoms during wake and sleep, and actigraphy measurement of sleep. Relationships between childhood abuse/neglect and vasomotor symptoms during wake and sleep were tested in linear regression models controlling for demographics, body mass index, and menopause stage. Results: 44% of the sample reported abuse or neglect during childhood. Among women reporting vasomotor symptoms, childhood sexual or physical abuse was associated with more frequent physiologically-recorded vasomotor symptoms during sleep (sexual abuse: b [SE] = 1.45 [0.52], P = 0.006; physical abuse: b [SE] = 0.97 [0.47], P = 0.03) in multivariable models. Among these women, women with a physical or sexual abuse history had approximately 1.5 to 2-fold the number of sleep vasomotor symptoms than women without this history. Conclusions: Childhood abuse is associated with more frequent physiologically-detected vasomotor symptoms during sleep.

Psychological behavior patterns and coping with menopausal symptoms among users and non-users of hormone replacement therapy in Finnish cohorts of women aged 52–56 years

“…There are studies which show that adverse childhood experiences associate with a myriad of adverse health outcomes, including vasomotor symptoms. Childhood abuse is associated with increased vasomotor symptom reporting in adulthood [20,21]. The sense of coherence may not have had the opportunity to develop robustly for women born in the years 1944-1948, since that generation lived in the aftermath of a great war, in contrast to women born ten years later, from 1954 to 1958.…”

Childhood predictors of age at natural menopause

“…The limited research available suggests that childhood abuse may correlate with symptom severity. Carson et al reported that women with a history of physical or sexual abuse have a 1.5–2 times greater risk of vasomotor sleep symptoms than those without this history [12]. This association, however, was not noted in women who reported only emotional abuse.…”

Effects of violence against women on health during menopause: a systematic review and metanalysis

“…The literature search strategy identified 194 articles, of which 117 were excluded at various stages of the search, eventually producing a final selection of 19 articles (Fig. 1), five of which were related to menopausal symptoms [10][11][12][13][14], two related to genitourinary symptoms [15,16], five studies on psychological health or physical conditions [17][18][19][20][21] three on sexual health [22][23][24], and four on cardiovascular or metabolic problems [25][26][27][28]. Nine studies were crosssectional studies [12-17, 19, 22, 23] and ten were cohort studies [10,11,18,20,21,[24][25][26][27][28]; two Brazilian [11,22], two Australian [17,24] and the rest from USA.…”

“…Table 1 (Ref. [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]) displays a summary of the main characteristics of the selected studies (study design, population, intervention, objective, and main results). The participants' mean age or age range was reported in all articles, but not the time since the violence episode, which was described in only one study [11].…”

“…Of particular interest are the data that indicate an increase in nocturnal vasomotor symptoms shown by women who have suffered violence [10,13,14]. Sleep disturbances may be due to problems other than the night sweats experienced by many women during menopause, which can be explained by heart rate variability or disturbances of the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.…”