Study Status: COMPLETED
Recruit Status: COMPLETED
Study Type: OBSERVATIONAL
Official Title: The Importance of Vasomotor Symptoms Accompanied With Sleep Disturbances in Respect of the Cardiovascular Risk: an Epigenetic Evaluation
Brief Summary:
Vasomotor symptoms are the most common symptoms seen during climacterium.
The hypoestrogenic state causes dysfunction of hypothalamic preoptic area, a thermoregulatory center.
The sympathetic overactivation during the hot flashes is associated with awakening during sleep and have a negative impact on cardiac indexes and vascular reactivity.
Therefore, hot flashes are accepted as subclinical cardiovascular risk factor.
The association between the severity of the hot flashes and cardiovascular risk may have an epigenetic background.
Recently, methylation changes of DNA was found to be associated with clinical and subclinical cardiovascular disease risk (atherosclerosis and hypertension etc.).
A transposable element in the DNA, Long interspersed nuclear elements (LINE-1), was found to be hypomethylated in cases with ischemic heart disease and stroke.
Therefore, the expression of repeating elements in the DNA (LINE-1 and ALU) may be considered as a mediator in the ischemic heart disease.
Until now, menopausal age, vasomotor symptoms and epigenetic and biological aging have been evaluated.
However, the epigenetic impact of severe vasomotor symptoms in postmenopausal women with low cardiovascular disease risk profile has not been evaluated.
In this study, we aimed to evaluate the epigenetic basis of cardiovascular disease risk for women with vasomotor symptoms which disturb sleep by assessing the methylation levels of ALU and LINE-1.