TUESDAY, Feb. 14 (HealthDay News) -- After pap cancer treatment, many women suffer from glowing flashes and night sweats, but a type of "talk therapy" might relieve these symptoms despite some women, British researchers suggest.

In a recently made known study, women who received this con~ation of psychotherapy, known as cognitive behavioral therapy, had reduced their symptoms ~ means of half within six months.

"Hot flashes and darkness sweats are distressing symptoms, which mainspring social embarrassment and sleep problems, and they are challenging to gratification, especially for women who have had chest cancer" because hormone replacement therapy is as the world goes not recommended for these women, explained precedence researcher Myra Hunter.

According to background notice in the study, which is published in the Feb. 15 online issue of The Lancet Oncology, 65 percent to 85 percent of women be in possession of hot flashes after breast cancer handling.

Group cognitive behavioral therapy is a strong box and effective treatment for women who be in actual possession of hot flashes and night sweats following thorax cancer treatment, Hunter said, with adscititious benefits to mood, sleep and persons of rank of life.

"The women in this test reported frequent and problematic symptoms and comparatively low quality of life," said Hunter, a professor of clinical freedom from disease psychology at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry.

Hunter's team randomly assigned 96 women who had been treated instead of breast cancer and suffered from ignorance sweats and hot flashes to any one "talk therapy" or usual care.

The 47 women who believed the therapy attended weekly 90-sixty seconds sessions for six weeks. For the others, normal care consisted of access to nurses and oncologists, telephone befriend and cancer support services, the researchers remarkable.

The therapy sessions included psycho-education, paced breathing, and behavioral strategies to manage of high temperature flashes and night sweats, as well during the time that interactive PowerPoint presentations, group discussion, handouts and hebdomadary homework, Hunter said.

In addition, participants erudite how to handle the stress associated by hot flashes and night sweats, and construct new ways to decrease anxiety, she explained.

The women were in like manner taught to manage hot flashes in friendly situations and to understand night sweats and improve be heedless habits using mental and behavioral strategies.

The investigators raise that the women who had current the cognitive behavioral therapy significantly reduced the count of hot flashes and night sweats they able in the nine weeks after the set on foot of the study.

This reduction in symptoms lasted instead of 26 weeks. At nine weeks in that place was a 46 percent reduction in symptoms and a 52 percent retrenchment at 26 weeks, Hunter's team build.

However, among women receiving usual care, stinging flashes and night sweats decreased ~ dint of. 19 percent after nine weeks and 25 percent subsequent to 26 weeks.

"These reductions were sustained and associated through significant improvements in mood, sleep and property of life," Hunter said. "This is a secure, acceptable and effective treatment option, which can be incorporated into breast cancer survivorship programs and delivered by trained breast cancer nurses."

Holly Prigerson, mentor of the Center for Psycho-Oncology and Palliative Care Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, wrote every accompanying journal editorial.

"Hot flashes and obscurity sweats are very common, distressing and persevering -- women reported being troubled by them with respect to an average of two years in relation to breast cancer treatment," Prigerson said.

She illustrious that the new study provides measure evidence upon which to recommend cognitive behavioral therapy against breast cancer patients suffering from these symptoms.

"Adaptations to ~y online, self-management version of the intervention would allow for more flexible scheduling and greater admittance at potentially lower cost of labor," Prigerson said. "Combining the intervention by medications that effectively treat hot flashes and night sweats might produce the most dramatic movables with reductions in symptoms as well like the distress caused by them."

Prigerson said this type of therapy might in like manner be used to treat postmenopausal women sufferance from these symptoms.

"Of course, scientifically, we have power to't generalize beyond the sample of women who experience menopausal symptoms as a result of usage for breast cancer," she said. "But given that they cast that [this type of therapy] worked forward the distress associated with hot flashes and ignorance sweats, then it would seem in a fair way to generalize to menopausal symptoms versed outside of this context."

More denunciation

For more about psychotherapy, visit the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.

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