MsFLASH participants’ priorities for alleviating menopausal symptoms

ABSTRACT

Objective To describe self-reported menopausal symptom priorities and their association with demographics and other symptoms among participants in an intervention trial for vasomotor symptoms (VMS).

Methods Cross-sectional study embedded in the MsFLASH 02 trial, a three-by-two factorial design of yoga vs. exercise vs. usual activity and omega-3-fatty acid vs. placebo. At baseline, women (n = 354) completed hot flush diaries, a card sort task to prioritize symptoms they would most like to alleviate, and standardized questionnaires.

Results The most common symptom priorities were: VMS (n = 322), sleep (n = 191), concentration (n = 140), and fatigue (n = 116). In multivariate models, women who chose VMS as their top priority symptom (n = 210) reported significantly greater VMS severity (p = 0.004) and never smoking (p = 0.012), and women who chose sleep as their top priority symptom (n = 100) were more educated (p ≤ 0.001) and had worse sleep quality (p < 0.001). ROC curves identified sleep scale scores that were highly predictive of ranking sleep as a top priority symptom.

Conclusions Among women entering an intervention trial for VMS and with relatively low prevalence of depression and anxiety, VMS was the priority symptom for treatment. A card sort may be a valid tool for quickly assessing symptom priorities in clinical practice and research.

Key words:

• MENOPAUSE
• SYMPTOMS
• VASOMOTOR SYMPTOMS
• SLEEP DISTURBANCES
• FATIGUE
• COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING

Conflict of interest Mr Hohensee and Drs Carpenter, Woods, Otte, Guthrie, Newton, Sternfeld, Lau, and LaCroix have no disclosures. Dr Joffe has grant support from Teva and Merck and is an advisor/consultant for Noven, Merck, and Mitsubishi Tanabe. Dr Cohen has research support from AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb/Otsuka, Cephalon, Inc., Ortho-McNeil Janssen, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Takeda/Lundbeck. He is an advisor/consultant for JDS Therapeutics LLC. Dr Reed has grant funding from Bayer Pharmaceuticals.

Source of funding This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health as a cooperative agreement issued by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), the Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH), and grants U01 AG032656, U01AG032659, U01AG032669, U01AG032682, U01AG032699, U01AG032700 from the NIA. At Indiana University, the project was funded in part with support from the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, grant UL1RR02571 from the NIH, National Center for Research Resources, Clinical and Translational Sciences Award.