ChiliPad™ Reduces Severity of Hot Flashes in Menopausal Women

GBB Note: Ahhhh... A cool bed and a good night's sleep? Delightful idea.

(BUSINESS WIRE)--For many women, the word "menopause" means living with innumerable symptoms which can alter the course of their lives. Menopause affects nearly 40 million women in the United States and while it is a natural time of physical and emotional change, it can also be a time of confusion and worry. Common symptoms include hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, irritability, low libido, and depression. Hot Flashes are the most common symptom experienced by menopausal women.

ChiliPad™, a revolutionary mattress pad with both heating and cooling functions, reduces the severity of hot flashes by allowing consumers to adjust the entire surface of their bed to the desired temperature. ChiliPad cools and warms a bed from 48 to 118 degrees F.

"Often if a room is too cold for one person it is too warm for the other,” said Todd Youngblood, president and co-founder, ChiliTechnology, LLC. “Some couples resort to opening windows or turning on the AC all night to stay cool. Instead of cooling the whole house to get a comfortable night's sleep, you can just cool the bed. This is especially helpful for women experiencing hot flashes and night sweats or anyone who just needs to cool their body down to get a good night’s sleep.”

According to the National Sleep Foundation, about 61 percent of menopausal women suffer from some kind of sleep disorder. Sleep is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle, allowing the mind to rest and reorganize before the next day's events; menopausal women who are having trouble sleeping feel the effects in every part of their lives.

“When having hot flashes, it's hard to fool Mother Nature,” said Karen Giblin, president, Red Hot Mamas. “Hot flashes and night sweats affect 75-85% of women. Women feel intense heat, get flushed, perspire, and they may get uncomfortably wet during the night. This may cause them to awaken and the next day they may feel fatigued and moody. Good news gals, we now have a product that can fool Mother Nature. The new product is the ChiliPad which gives some of us a new lease on menopausal life. So, as the temperatures soars in your bed at night, and you are tossing and turning feeling that greenhouse effect when those hot flashes and night sweats strike, all you have to now do is to turn on your ChiliPad. Your bed will stay cool and you will be more comfortable during the night."

The ChiliPad can be used 12 months out of the year to keep the bed cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Anyone suffering from menopause, injury or illness where cooling the body down or warming it up helps, benefits from a ChiliPad. To learn more about ChiliPad and how it is being used by consumers, please contact Jane Westgate at 336-209-9276 or via e-mail pr@chilitechnology.com.

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Women Using Compounded 'Bioidentical' Hormones Miss the Full Story About These Drugs

/PRNewswire/ -- Women in, or past, menopause who use specially compounded "bioidentical" hormones to treat menopause-related symptoms, such as hot flushes, often don't get adequate information from compounding pharmacists about the drugs' risks and realistic potential for benefit. That's one of the concerns about these medications addressed by menopause expert JoAnn V. Pinkerton, MD, in "'Bioidentical' hormones: What you (and your patient) need to know," in the January issue of OBG Management.

So-called bioidentical hormones are chemically similar to hormones released by the body, including those produced in the ovaries -- estrone, estradiol, estriol, progesterone, testosterone, and dehydroepiandrosterone, to name some.

"The FDA has approved many prescription products that contain 'bioidentical' hormones," says Pinkerton, "but 'bioidentical' is often used to refer to custom-compounded hormones. The major difference between FDA-approved prescription bioidentical hormone products and custom-compounded products is that only the former are regulated by the FDA and tested for purity, potency, efficacy, and safety."

"That means it's up to physicians who prescribe compounded hormones to educate their patients -- about potential risks and benefits, absence of FDA oversight, purity and potency concerns, and lack of peer-reviewed data on efficacy and safety," Pinkerton says.

"Practitioners need to recognize that women who ask for these hormones may be vulnerable -- because of anxiety and depression that often accompany menopausal symptoms -- to unsubstantiated claims or recommendations of self-proclaimed experts."

"Compounded hormones aren't safer, or more effective, than traditional FDA-approved hormone therapies," Pinkerton emphasizes. "No data support individualized, personalized therapy based on testing hormone levels in saliva. And compounded bioidentical hormones don't prevent cancer; they probably have the same potential to cause cancer, and present the same other health risks, as FDA-approved hormones."

Bioidentical hormones are one of the biggest products of the multibillion-dollar US pharmaceutical compounding industry, observes Bruce Patsner, MD, JD, who contributed to the OBG Management article. Patsner, an expert on pharmacy compounding of prescription hormone therapy, served as senior medical officer at the FDA and is now Research Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center.

JoAnn V. Pinkerton, MD, is Professor and Vice Chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville, where she directs The Women's Place Midlife Health Center. She is a member of the Board of Editors of OBG Management, a review publication for ObGyns (www.obgmanagement.com).

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