Nerve Blocks For Hot Flashes

Many women are looking for non-hormonal and non-herbal treatments for hot flashes. They are concerned about the elevated risk of heart attacks and estrogen-stimulated cancers that comes with estrogen replacement therapy, and they do not want to wait 3 to 4 months to get a modest, not entirely reliable benefit from herbs.

For these women, the answer may be a treatment called a stellate ganglion block, in which a nerve-numbing agent is injected into a bundle of nerves in the neck. Recently a group of physicians at the University of Illinois at Chicago tried this method on a group of 40 women aged 30 to 70 who had mild to severe hot flashes, giving them either the nerve blocking agent or a placebo saline solution. In this study, a severe hot flash was defined as "raging furnace warmth," accompanied by weakness, feeling faint, extreme perspiration, and/or irregular heartbeat. Women in the study were asked to keep a diary of their hot flashes for six months, and for the first three months they also wore a monitor that recorded objective data about their hot flashes.

Senior researcher Dr. Pauline Maki, an associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reported that the women who received the nerve block and the women who received the placebo saline solution had about the same numbers of hot flashes, but the women who received the actual nerve block reported fewer moderate to severe hot flashes, about 52% fewer moderate to severe hot flashes, compared to 4% moderate to severe hot flashes in the women who had received the placebo.

Of course, many women who do not want to receive estrogen replacement therapy are not especially keen to have injections in their necks, either. However, one group of women may be especially eager to try the new technique.

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Hot flashes are a common and severe side effect for many women who take estrogen sequestering agents, such as Tamoxifen, after breast cancer. These women cannot receive estrogen replacement therapy, because it might stimulate growth of cancer cells missed during surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. They usually also should not take herbal preparations because of a lower risk of the same effect. For these women, physically blocking nerves may be the only way to stop the hot flashes that make their recovery from cancer an even longer and more arduous task.

Nerve blocks are not especially risk, and they are usually covered by insurance. If you have hot flashes that simply will not go away, ask your doctor whether a nerve block is available for you.