Last Updated: 2003-06-03 16:42:38 -0400 (Reuters Health)

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A popular antidepressant helped reduce the frequency of hot flashes in menopausal women, a drug company-funded study said on Tuesday, though an independent researcher said the drug's effectiveness was limited.

Alternative treatments to hormone replacement therapy for menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats and memory and sleep problems will be looked at more closely because of studies showing long-term hormone therapy increases women's risks of cancer, strokes and dementia.

The drug paroxetine, sold under the brand name Paxil by GlaxoSmithKline Plc, halved the number of hot flashes suffered by women in the study, which was company funded and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Women who took an inert placebo also had fewer hot flashes, though the improvement was not as great as with the drug, which cut hot flashes to a median of 3.8 per day from 7.1 per day in women taking a relatively low daily dosage of 12.5 milligrams of Paxil.

Some women taking the drug suffered headaches, dizziness and nausea -- though those effects were reduced in women who took the lower dose, wrote study author Vered Stearns of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Paxil and other antidepressants known collectively as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors have been shown to help relieve hot flashes in earlier studies.

But Steven Goldstein, a gynecologist at New York University Medical Center, said the improvement in menopausal symptoms from antidepressants was not nearly as great as with treatment with the hormone estrogen, which restores roughly 80 percent of his patients who suffer debilitating symptoms.

"For women who cannot, should not or will not take hormone therapy this (antidepressants) may be a possible option, but in no way, shape or form is it a substitute for estrogen for people with disruptive symptoms," Goldstein said in a telephone interview.

"I would probably only think of something like this in women who absolutely cannot consider short-term low-dose estrogen therapy: women with breast cancer, women on (the breast cancer drug) tamoxifen. (For) that subgroup, this is a nice thing to be able to offer them," he said.