Extinguishing the Fire: New Solutions for Hot Flushes in New Zealand

It starts as a sudden wave of warmth in your chest before erupting into a full-blown, face-flushing heat wave that disrupts your meetings and steals your sleep.

For midlife women across New Zealand, hot flushes and night sweats are among the most disruptive perimenopause symptoms NZ presents. These vasomotor symptoms occur because the brain's internal thermostat the hypothalamus becomes hyper-sensitive to fluctuating estrogen levels, mistakenly signaling the body to cool down rapidly.

While hormone replacement has long been the gold standard, a groundbreaking era of non-hormonal treatments has arrived.

• The Power of Fezolinetant: A newly developed, non-hormonal oral therapy known as fezolinetant works by directly blocking neurokinin B (NKB) signaling pathways within the brain's temperature-control center (Mathur, 2024).

• Proven Clinical Efficacy: Robust Phase 3 randomized controlled trials (the SKYLIGHT studies) have shown that fezolinetant successfully reduces the frequency and severity of moderate-to-severe hot flushes by approximately 50% (Johnson et al., 2023).

• Long-Term Safety Profile: Extensive 52-week clinical evaluations demonstrate that this treatment maintains its efficacy over the long term with a well-tolerated safety profile, showing no negative impacts on bone health or endometrial thickness (Yu et al., 2024).

This innovation offers incredible hope for women who cannot take hormones due to medical reasons, ensuring no one has to suffer through the heat in silence.

References

• Johnson, K. A., Martin, N., Nappi, R. E., Neal-Perry, G., Shapiro, M., Stute, P., Thurston, R. C., Wolfman, W., English, M., Franklin, C., Lee, M., & Santoro, N. (2023). Efficacy and Safety of Fezolinetant in Moderate to Severe Vasomotor Symptoms Associated With Menopause: A Phase 3 RCT. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 108(8), 1981–1997.

• Mathur, S. (2024). Fezolinetant – a new oral nonhormonal treatment for menopausal hot flushes. Fezolinetant – a new oral nonhormonal treatment for menopausal hot flushes.

• Yu, Q., Ming, F., Ma, J., Cai, Y., Wang, L., Ren, M., Zhang, J., Ma, X., Miyazaki, K., He, W., & Wang, X. (2024). Long-term safety of fezolinetant in Chinese women with vasomotor symptoms associated with menopause: the phase 3 open-label MOONLIGHT 3 clinical trial. Journal of International Medical Research, 52.