Different Responses of Fragrance depending on mild and severe Menopause symptoms in Women

Abstract

Menopause is the critical periods of women. In this periods, women undergo rapid hormonal change and stop menstruation. Between late 40’s to early 50’s, most women cannot avoid the menopause. When menopause transition starts, women suffer from physical and emotional symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweat, insomnia, anxiety, mood swings and depressive moods.

To be getting better these symptoms hormone replacement therapy and medications have been used however it has some potential side effects including breast cancer and stroke. Because of this concern, alternative approaches also have been tried to improve symptoms of menopause. Fragrance of essential oils have been reported about many effects such as releasing stress, improving depressive moods and relieving anxiety. These effects are related with menopausal symptoms. It can be helpful for menopausal women and it’s easy to use. Despite of these advantages, there are only few studies about its physiological and emotional effects in menopausal women. Furthermore, we need to expand our understanding of menopausal women’s odor perception to use fragrance properly and pleasantly. Preliminary studies reported that odor perception was changed during pregnancy or menstrual cycle. Menopausal period also need to check odor perception changes.

Therefore, in this study, we confirmed relax effects of fragrances in menopause women. In addition, we checked physiological and odor perceptional responses of fragrance depending on the mild and severe symptoms of menopause.

Mid-life women who are age in 45–55 were attend to this study. The Kupperman index which is widely used for checking seriousness of menopause symptom was used to divide into mild and severe group. Fragrance was chosen from essential oils by using pre-fragrance estimation. Fragrance L, P, O29 was used in this study.

In consequence, first, mild and severe symptom of menopause group answered differently in fragrance preference and relaxation estimate. Second, the results of physiology and EEG showed similar pattern with fragrance estimate. Specifically, P has more relaxation effect in severe symptom group than mild symptom group. L was effective in mild symptom group. And new fragrance O 29 was effective both mild and severe symptom groups.

Through this study, we notice that response and effects of fragrance may differ depending on severity of symptoms in menopause women. And we confirmed relax effects of fragrances L, P, O after stressful stimulus for menopausal women. Therefore, when we use fragrances to help menopausal women who are suffering from symptoms, we could choose suitable fragrance according to their symptoms of menopause.