A therapy that helps women survive menopause has been named

A new study has found that talk therapy can help women cope with menopause. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) have been shown to improve quality of life and are less likely to cause anxiety and depression.

Talk therapy can help women cope with menopause by improving their quality of life and reducing symptoms such as depression and anxiety, research has found.

As The Guardian explains, menopause marks the end of menstruation for women and involves a transition period that can last several years. This phenomenon is often accompanied by a range of symptoms caused by hormonal changes, including hot flashes, night sweats, memory problems and psychological difficulties including depression and anxiety.

Now researchers say talking therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) could help women during this period.

Professor Aimee Spector, study author from University College London (UCL), said there was a clear link between the physical and psychological symptoms of menopause, citing hot flashes as one example.

“When people have hot flashes, they tend to be very worried about them, and that worry can often cause people to have more hot flashes,” she notes.

Professor Spector emphasizes that treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy can help women combat the negative thoughts they may have around symptoms, such as fears about what others might think.

Writing in the journal Affective Disorders, Aimee Spector and her colleagues described how they pooled data from 22 robust studies that examined the effects of various interventions, such as marital support, on psychological symptoms of menopause.

When considered together, they found that these treatments had a moderate to large effect on quality of life and a small but positive effect on anxiety and depression.

They were also associated with small improvements in memory and concentration—however, since these results were found in only three studies, it is unclear whether this finding is reliable.

More specifically, cognitive behavioral therapy had a small effect on depression and anxiety, while mindfulness-based interventions had a small effect on the former but a moderate to large effect on the latter. A finding that alerted the team may be due to the fact that the duration of the MBI interventions was longer than that of CBT.

An additional eight studies, which did not have enough data to be included in the analysis and included a range of treatments, offered some additional support for the findings.

However, it is unclear how long-lasting any benefits are, when during menopause such treatments may be most beneficial, or whether they may benefit some women more than others, The Guardian notes.

Additionally, the study was unable to shed light on how much significant mood improvement women might get from such treatments.

Aimee Spector says more research is needed, including on how best to implement these treatments and whether CBT can help women live with or cope with cognitive problems associated with menopause, such as brain fog.

The possibility of using talk therapy such as CBT to manage symptoms associated with menopause has generated significant controversy in recent months after draft National Institute for Health Care Excellence guidelines for GPs suggested that CBT could be offered “alongside or as an alternative to ” hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to treat symptoms, including night sweats.