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Exercise Eases Menopause Symptoms
Friday, March 24, 2006
By Jennifer Warner
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It’s never too late for women to reap the benefits from starting a regular exercise program, according to a new study that shows exercise can relieve the symptoms of menopause and improve quality of life.
Researchers found menopausal women aged 55-72 who started a yearlong exercise program experienced significant improvement in both mental and physical health while those who didn’t exercise got worse.
“The group that improved took part in three hours of fully supervised exercise a week for 12 months,” says researcher Carmen Villaverde-Gutierrez, professor of nursing at the University of Granada in Spain, in a news release. “As well as monitoring severe symptoms, we also looked at the women’s quality of life and found that the average scores for the exercise group improved while those for the control group decreased.”
The results appear in the Journal of Advanced Nursing.
Exercise Relieves Symptoms
In the study, researchers examined the effects of an exercise program consisting of cardiovascular, stretching, muscle strengthening, and relaxation exercises in 48 menopausal women. Half of the women participated in the 12-month exercise program and the other half did not.
At the start of the study, 50 percent of the women in the exercise group and about 58 percent of nonexercisers had severe menopausal symptoms. By the end of the study, the percentage of women with severe menopausal symptoms dropped to 37 percent among the exercise group and rose to over 66 percent among the others.
