TRIP

Study clouds evidence on soy and menopause

Reuters Health News, 2012

A farmer shows soy seeds ready to plant in the Pergamino district of the Buenos Aires province October 29, 2010.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Middle-aged women may find some relief from hot flashes and other menopause problems with soy supplements, according to Chinese researchers.
They found daily supplements of soy germ isoflavones reduced the sudden sweats more than inactive placebo pills after six months.
Wong, a nutrition researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who wasn't involved in the new work.
A third of them received placebo pills made of starch, while the rest took soy germ isoflavones, either 84 or 126 milligrams a day.
They all kept diaries of their hot flashes and filled out questionnaires about various problems tied to menopause, including hot flashes, sweating, insomnia, tiredness and headache.
At six months, their Kupperman scores -- a measure of symptom severity that ranges from 0 to 63 -- had dropped by more than 40 percent from an initial value of about 25 in the soy groups.
Their symptom score dropped by 29 percent and the number of hot flashes by 35 percent, according to Dr.
In one of his own studies, Wong found no effect on soy germ isoflavones among women who took the supplements for two years.
But doctors and women have become increasingly wary of that option because of serious side effects such as increased risk for heart attack, stroke and breast cancer.
Soy supplements also have side effects such as nausea, bloating, and constipation, according to the National Institutes of Health.