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Women awakened in the middle of the night by hot flashes might find a bit of cool comfort in a new research study showing that women who experienced hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms were much less likely to have been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center say women who experienced hot flashes and other symptoms had a 40 to 60 percent reduction in the rate of invasive ductal and invasive lobular carcinoma, two of the most common types of breast cancer.

The lead researcher, Dr. Christopher Li, a breast-cancer epidemiologist in the Hutch's Public Health Sciences Division, suspected there might be a connection, because hormones such as estrogen and progesterone play a role not only in the development of most breast cancers but -- when those hormones are reduced by menopause or surgery -- in the frequency and severity of menopausal symptoms.

This is the first study to look specifically at the relationship between severity of menopausal symptoms and breast-cancer risk, the researchers said.

To do the study, which was funded by the National Cancer Institute, Li and his colleagues interviewed 1,437 postmenopausal Seattle-area women aged 55 to 74. Using a tumor registry, researchers selected 988 women who had been previously diagnosed with one of three different types of breast cancer. The other 449 women, who had not been diagnosed with breast cancer and served as the study's control group, were selected randomly.

They were all asked about premenopausal and menopausal symptoms, including hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, vaginal dryness, irregular menstrual bleeding, depression and anxiety.

The researchers found that compared with women who never reported having such symptoms, those who did had half the risk of the two most common types of breast cancer.

Researchers said they were able to get the most detailed information about hot flashes -- a common and unmistakable symptom -- finding that the most intense hot flashes were associated with progressively lower risks in all three types of breast cancer studied.

Hot flashes so intense that they awakened women in the middle of the night or drenched them in perspiration were the most likely to be associated with lower risk of cancer, compared with less intense symptoms.

There are plausible biologic explanations for the findings, the researchers said: Menopausal symptoms are a "surrogate marker" for the hormonal changes that are relevant to breast cancer.

In general, the associations noted by the researchers were not changed by women's use of hormone therapy, age at menopause or body mass index.

But because so many women reported more than one type of menopausal symptom, researchers weren't able to tease out as much about possible associations with other, non-hot-flash symptoms and breast-cancer risk.

The study was published in the online and February print issue of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention. The researchers reported no potential conflicts of interest.

Copyright (c) 2011, The Seattle Times 

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