The lucky ones will only have them three times a week, while others will have their “vapors” ten times a day, which can be a major inconvenience. Being overweight exposes more to hot flashes, while physical exercise seems to limit the frequency and intensity, allowing better resistance of the body to sudden changes in temperature. However, the phenomenon would be uncomfortable for a quarter of women.
The most well-known and characteristic disorder of this period, hot flashes result in an intense, unpredictable and irrepressible heat wave, which most often inflames the face, neck and chest. But it can also cover the whole body or, conversely, be limited to the face. It generally lasts from thirty seconds to three minutes and ends with cold sweats, more or less profuse. In some women, it is also accompanied by a feeling of pressure in the head. It is downright disagreeable to “boil” like this, it must be admitted: the clothes stick, the makeup melts and one has the impression of displaying one’s intimate transformations in the eyes of all. A reassuring point, however: in the unanimous opinion of doctors and those around them, observers, in general, are not aware of anything.
As we age, the ovaries respond less well to messages from the hypothalamus. This then intensifies the orders to make them secrete hormones. But, its efforts remaining more and more ineffective, the hypothalamic center begins to function in an anarchic manner. However, in this same region is also the center of thermoregulation, the one that maintains the body temperature at 37 ° C. The control center of the ovarian function being deregulated, this causes by neighborhood turbulence of the thermoregulation center, which sometimes decides, irrelevant, to trigger a few puffs.
