{"id":642,"date":"2015-05-27T07:27:42","date_gmt":"2015-05-27T12:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.socpsy.com\/casks\/?p=642"},"modified":"2017-04-14T08:42:05","modified_gmt":"2017-04-14T13:42:05","slug":"hops-and-menopause","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.socpsy.com\/casks\/hops-and-menopause\/","title":{"rendered":"Hops and Menopause"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why am I interested in this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bear with me as I present my circuitous thinking about some new research on hops that I find quite interesting. As readers of this blog know, I like to identify modern research that provides support for practices in antiquity when folks did not have the technological advantages that we have today. They did<\/strong> have and use keen observation to make connections between practices and outcomes that led to effective treatments.<\/p>\n

I recently became interested in references to the effects of hops on the menstrual cycle. My interest was piqued for a couple of reasons.\u00a0 First, I teach a lifespan development course twice a year. When I cover the topic of menopause, I discuss the importance of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI)<\/a>, a long-term study of thousands of women on a variety of health-related issues.\u00a0 With respect to menopause, the hormone therapy component<\/a> of the Initiative has special interest due to findings that hormone therapy carries significant long-term health risks for some women. Combined therapy (estrogen + progestin) and estrogen-alone therapy involve the administration of these hormones to prevent or ameliorate some of the short- and long-term effects of menopause.\u00a0 However, the hormone therapy component of the WHI found that this long standing approach to “treating” menopause should not be universally applied to all women<\/a>. In fact, the results of the hormone therapy component were so striking that the combined and estrogen-only studies were stopped early in 2002 and 2004<\/a>, respectively. The findings fundamentally changed the way that hormone therapy is practiced.\u00a0 But, I digress….<\/p>\n

The second reason why the connection between hops and menopause is interesting to me is the fact that I am a brewer (Duh!).\u00a0 That, in and of itself, isn’t sufficient for my interest.\u00a0 What is sufficient are the references I’ve seen regarding the effects of handling hops on the menstrual cycles of women. Some of these references go back a couple of centuries. I am interested in tracing this effect back as far as I can to determine if this relationship was observed during the Medieval period.\u00a0 Lots of work to do on this!<\/p>\n

Several references connecting hops to menstrual\/gynecological issues show up in recent literature. Authors hint or even outright claim that hops played a role in menstrual processes and therapies in antiquity (Milligan, et al., 2002;\u00a0Lewis & Elvin-Lewis, 2003; Biendl, 2009; Aghamiri, et al., 2015). Some examples of claims\/references:<\/p>\n