An observational Furthermore, mindfulness had the greatest positive effect on menopausal symptoms for those women with the highest self-reported stress levels.
“In this cross-sectional study, mindfulness was associated with lower menopausal symptom burden. In women with higher stress, the magnitude of association between mindfulness and menopausal symptoms appeared more robust,” said Richa Sood, MD, speaking at the annual meeting of the North American Menopause Society.
Menopausal symptoms can exist alongside many other midlife issues because women often are trying to keep many balls in the air: This age group may be facing aging parents, a household with teenagers, and work-related pressures, she noted.
Thus, menopausal symptoms can be amplified by stressors. New mood problems – or worsening of preexisting ones – can interfere with work productivity and negatively affect relationships. Life satisfaction can take a steep dive during midlife for some women, said Dr. Sood of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.
Could mindfulness be effective for stress management in this complex landscape of physiological and lifespan changes? “Mindfulness is paying attention,” said Dr. Sood. Practitioners of mindfulness focus on purposeful attention, staying in the present moment, and avoiding judgment.
Mindfulness may work as a stress-management tool for a variety of reasons, said Dr. Sood. The technique can help retrain people with tendencies for emotional reactivity in stressful situations; additionally, the focus on the present and on observation, rather than judgment, may help avoid maladaptive rumination.
To see how mindfulness in everyday life could affect the burden of menopausal symptoms, Dr. Sood and her collaborators designed an observational, cross-sectional study of 1,744 women aged 40-64 years.
The investigators used three scales in their assessments. The first, the Menopause Rating Scale (MRS), is an 11-item scale ranging from 0 to 44 that assesses psychological, somatovegetative, and urogenital domains. The second, the Perceived Stress Scale 4 (PSS-4), is a four-item scale that is a global measure of stress over the last 4 weeks, with tallied scores in the 0-16 range. Finally, the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) is a 15-item scale that captures how frequently respondents are in a mindful state during their daily life, with higher scores meaning more mindfulness.
The 1,744 women were seen in a women’s health clinic over the period of one year. Participants were a mean 53.4 years old (standard deviation, 6.1 years). Almost all were white (93%), most were married (82.7%), and most also had at least a 4-year college degree (64.6%) and were employed (65.3%).
The investigators mapped each scale against each of the others, which yielded three plots. In the first, higher MAAS scores were correlated with lower MRS scores (correlation, –0.49; P less than .001), which means that more time in a mindful state was associated with less severe menopausal symptoms.
In the second plot, lower MRS scores were associated with lower PSS-4 scores (correlation, 0.55; P less than .001). The last plot mapped PSS-4 scores against MAAS scores, showing that higher MAAS scores were correlated with lower PSS-4 scores, which means that more time in a mindful state was also associated with less perceived stress (correlation, –0.53; P less than .001).
Most of these associations remained statistically significant after multivariable linear regression analysis and breaking out the subscales of the MRS. Only the association between higher MAAS scores and the somatovegetative domain of the PSS-4 lost significance (P = 0.44).
Next, Dr. Sood and her collaborators probed how higher perceived stress, as measured by higher PSS-4 scores, altered the effects that mindful activity had on menopausal symptoms (as measured by the MRS).
The effect of mindfulness became stronger in the milieu of higher perceived stress. At a relatively low PSS-4 value of 4, the MRS score dropped 1.53 points for each one-point increase in the MAAS total score. However, with a PSS-4 score of 12, the decrease in MRS was 2.27 points for each one-point increase in MAAS, and with the maximum perceived stress score of 16, the MRS fell 2.64 points for each one-point increase in the MAAS score.
These findings are set against the backdrop of previous literature linking mindfulness to positive health behaviors and outcomes, she said, noting that work looking specifically at mindfulness-based stress reduction in peri- and postmenopausal women showed a halving of symptoms and improved quality of life.
Dr. Sood said that the present study was observational only, noting that it looked only at time spent in a mindful state in an untrained cohort of women in midlife. “Trait, or dispositional, mindfulness appears to be protective against stress and symptoms in midlife women,” she commented. “More mindful women may be choosing to shift their attention to more pleasant aspects of life, rather than their symptoms.”
“If you allow me to speculate a bit,” Dr. Sood continued, “the underpinnings of psychological symptoms rest in threat-focused attention and emotional reactivity – so the mindfulness approach appears to fit very well to impact such a change.”
Mindfulness, she added, “might be a tool to impact the emotional component of the overall experience, thereby decreasing the total suffering.” However, she noted that what’s needed are studies with a more heterogeneous population, as well as ones designed to tease out causality. Still, “the current study adds to the wealth of data supporting the role of mindfulness in various settings for impacting positive change in health and behaviors.”
Dr. Sood reported that she has ownership stake in the Global Center for Resiliency and Well-Being.
SOURCE: Sood R et al. NAMS 2018, Top-Scoring Abstract Session.