UMMS Affiliation

Department of Medicine; Meyers Primary Care Institute

Publication Date

2015-08-13

Document Type

Article

Disciplines

Health Information Technology | Obstetrics and Gynecology | Reproductive and Urinary Physiology | Women's Health

Abstract

BACKGROUND: To assess the prevalence of menopausal symptoms among women prescribed hormone therapy (HT) using electronic medical record data from a regional healthcare organization.

METHODS: Retrospective data from the Reliant Medical Group from 1/1/2006-12/31/2011 were assessed for 102 randomly-selected patients. Study eligibility criteria included: females aged 45 to 65; prescribed oral or transdermal HT; no history of breast cancer, venous thromboembolism, stroke, gynecological cancer, or hysterectomy; continuously enrolled in the health plan for 1 year before and after the first observed HT prescription. Prevalence of menopause-related symptoms was analyzed descriptively at both the patient and visit levels.

RESULTS: Mean age of patients was 54 years. The most common menopausal symptoms were: hot flushes (40%), night sweats (17%), insomnia (16%), vaginal dryness (13%), mood disorders (12%), and weight gain (12%). Among the 102 patients, 163 individual visits listing menopausal symptoms were identified, of which hot flushes (71 visits) were the most common symptom identified.

CONCLUSION: Our findings provide recent data on the types of menopausal symptoms experienced by mid-life women prescribed HT. Electronic medical records may be a rich source of data for future studies of menopausal symptoms in this population.

Rights and Permissions

Copyright © Sussman et al. 2015. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

DOI of Published Version

10.1186/s12905-015-0217-y

Source

BMC Womens Health. 2015 Aug 13;15:58. doi: 10.1186/s12905-015-0217-y. Link to article on publisher's site

Journal/Book/Conference Title

BMC women's health

Related Resources

Link to Article in PubMed

PubMed ID

26271251

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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