Psychosomatic symptoms of postmenopausal women with or without hormonal treatment

The purpose of this study is to compare the psychosomatic symptoms of postmenopausal women who are users of hormonal treatment with the psychosomatic symptoms of nonusers. We studied 68 postmenopausal women receiving estrogen treatment (age range 48-56 years; 51.1 +/- 1.9, mean +/- SD) and 50 postmenopausal women (age range 45-55 years; 50.7 +/- 2.5) as controls. The symptoms we studied were: (1) nightly perspiration; (2) vasomotor flushes; (3) dyspnea; (4) vertigo; (5) headache; (6) disturbance of libido; (7) depression, and (8) anxiety. We found a beneficial effect of estrogen treatment in nightly perspiration (p less than 0.01), vasomotor flushes (p less than 0.001) and disturbance of libido (p less than 0.01). We found no difference between the two groups in dyspnea, vertigo, headache, depression and anxiety. Our findings show that with hormonal treatment in postmenopausal women there is a beneficial effect in only some psychosomatic symptoms.