“Sleep touches on nearly every aspect of our physiology and psychology, of our interaction with the world and with others.”
William Dement (2000)/ Sleep Research Pioneer
This article comes directly from Dr Wendy Sweet an expert in the field of menopause and someone I follow closely as I have a lot of respect for her work in this area of health. I highly recommend her programme for ladies looking for some additional support in menopause.
Over 20,000 students took William Dement’s course on ‘Sleep and Dreams’ throughout his tenure at Stanford University. He created and pioneered the fields of sleep research, sleep medicine and sleep disorders. His mission was to educate the world about the importance of sleep, which he believed was dangerously undervalued. His motto, “drowsiness is red alert,” is a message he tirelessly broadcast to his students, trainees, members of Congress and the world at large. According to Stanford University, among Dement’s key achievements were elucidating the phases of the human sleep cycle and identifying the physiological basis of dreams. His research helped us to understand that dreaming is how the brain cleanses overnight. William Dement only passed away in 2020. But I wish that he had lived long enough to undertake sleep research specifically tailored to women in menopause. We might have learnt a lot more than we currently know and even he may have asked the following question,
Do you need Melatonin rather than HRT for your symptoms in menopause?
It’s an interesting question isn’t it? And I’m asking it, based on brand new research about our sleep hormone, called melatonin, and the effect it has on women’s health in menopause, that arrived in my inbox this week.
Day after day, I get emails from women who are exhausted and exasperated from not sleeping. This is a bit of a concern, because for women living in the Western world up until around 80-82 years of age, they (hopefully) will have slept for a staggering 27 years! That’s why sleep is one of the most fundamental aspects of our health as we age.
But with the women I hear from, who are navigating their menopause transition, many complain that they are still not sleeping, despite HRT and numerous supplements, which are costing them a small fortune. After reading some of the work of William Dement as well as the new research this week, I’m wondering if, instead of supplements or HRT, a small dose of melatonin prescribed by their Doctor might be needed instead?
I don’t know the answer to this obviously. I’m just curious.
However, new insights about the role that our sleep hormone called melatonin, plays on menopause symptoms and the changes going on in our body as we age, that were written up in a new study about the possible connection between melatonin and the health of menopausal women was intriguing. (Treister-Goltzman & Peleg, 2021).
I think we’ve all heard of Melatonin. It’s the hormone released from a tiny gland in our brain that sets and resets our circadian drive for sleep. If you’ve watched my Masterclass on Menopause, you’ll know that I talk about how, as we move through menopause and age, our melatonin production declines. This is a natural part of our human ageing. Melatonin levels decline gradually over the life-span. Researchers believe that this decline may be related to lowered sleep duration and depth in women after the menopause, as well as resulting in some deterioration of the processes controlling our circadian rhythms.
Described in a 2007 study by Grivas and Savvidou, as “the light of the night” because it is secreted from the pineal gland principally at night, today, researchers better understand the role of melatonin and it’s involvement in a number of other cyclical bodily activities such as our menstrual cycle and of course, changes to our health that arrive during and after menopause.
Melatonin is exclusively involved in signalling the ‘time of day’ and ‘time of year’ (hence why we get out of sorts when we travel over the dateline or the seasons change and we have to cope with daylight savings). Melatonin is therefore, considered to be the body’s chronological pacemaker or ‘Zeitgeber’.
As sleep research has expanded over the last decade or so, melatonin has been used as a therapeutic chemical in a large spectrum of diseases, mainly in sleep disturbances. However, with the rapid expansion of sleep research over the past two decades, researchers better understand that this powerful and essential hormone may also play a role in the biologic regulation of mood, depression, cardiovascular system health, reproductive health (hence the interest in menopause and melatonin) and of course, our ageing.
I’m sure that most of us know the effect of insufficient sleep over the long term and how this makes us feel. I still remember my own despair walking down the hall to another bedroom, night after night, jealously leaving my husband to snore his way to sleep oblivion.
I’m passionate about women re-discoviering how to sleep during menopause. This is because when we don’t get enough sleep, this chronic deprivation can contribute to severe health disturbances as we age. It’s a challenge for women in post-menopause too.
But even for women in peri-menopause, (the time when periods begin to fluctuate), inadequate sleep causes hot flushes to worsen, as do night sweats, depression and anxiety. Not enough sleep also affects your body’s ability to regulate stress hormones which can also lead to high blood pressure. Getting enough quality sleep is also crucial for maintaining healthy levels of hormones that control appetite and blood glucose levels as well as energy . It’s why, if you aren’t sleeping, you might also be putting on weight.
That’s why I want to share this new research with you about melatonin – it seems that there’s a lot more to this powerful hormone than previously thought.
Researchers have discovered that melatonin is not only produced in the pineal gland (in the brain), it’s also produced locally in the bone marrow and the retina of the eye, in the gastrointestinal tract, the testes in males, and in human lymphocytes (white cells).
As such, when levels of melatonin decline as we age, there are effects around the body.
This matters to women in menopause, because the inter-connection between all of our hormones, means that the natural decline of our reproductive hormones during menopause also impacts the production and action of melatonin around the body.
If you’ve been following my articles for a while, you’ll know that I’m often telling you about your changing sleep patterns during menopause and how these impact your hot flushes, night sweats, sore joints, depression and even your gut health. But did you know that with the changes to your sleep patterns and the decline in melatonin production, this is having an effect on your bone density, gut and cardiac health and immune health too?
No, nor did I.
The aim of the review that I was reading this week was to explore the effect of melatonin supplements on women’s health and their bothersome symptoms during menopause. (Treister-Goltzman & Peleg, 2021). It made for interesting and curious reading, including the knowledge that disruptions in the circadian patterns of melatonin production, leads to numerous physiological changes in the body. Many of these changes relate to our symptoms during menopause.
Whilst the authors of the study mentioned that further studies needed to be undertaken and not all of the studies that they explored in their analysis showed a positive correlation of melatonin with menopause symptom reversal, their analysis of 24 studies on melatonin and women’s health, with a total of over 1300 participants, revealed that melatonin supplementation of 3-5mg over 6-12 months helped improve:
- Sleep quality in women with a pre-existing sleep impairment (which in turn improved immune function).
- Bone mineral density
- Weight loss in overweight women
- Mood state.
In women, the effects of melatonin on our reproductive functioning is important throughout our lifetime. Whilst levels of melatonin oscillate throughout the menstrual cycle, the problem that we have in menopause and post-menopause, is that melatonin levels decline with age. And altered melatonin levels coincide with changes to our health – sleep disorders, inflammatory changes, bone density concerns and of course, immune health changes and increased risk for heart disease.
For more from Wendy Sweet her website has a tonne of useful info: https://www.mymenopausetransformation.com/meet-wendy-sweet/