4. Discussion
menopausal syndrome
CHRONIC DISEASES, ESTROGEN DEFICIENCY, MENOPAUSAL SYNDROME, DISEASES, OSTEOPOROSIS
The present study took the lead in exploring the effects of multidisciplinary health education intervention based on lifestyle medicine on menopausal women in China. The current study revealed that MHELM helped the women to feel relief from troublesome menopausal syndrome, improve healthy lifestyle behaviors and enhance awareness of menopausal health management.In our findings, the menopausal syndrome of participants was significantly improved in the intervention group compared to the control group when drug usage was matched between groups. This confirmed that the MHELM intervention was effective in improving the menopausal syndrome. Our observations were consistent with some studies which reported the effectiveness of health education interventions (We observed that the control group had a significant improvement on the symptoms of menopausal syndrome without MHELM intervention. Moreover, the results indicated that the menopausal syndrome of participants had a significant improvement in the hormone drug group compared to the non-hormone drug group. The evidence further confirmed that appropriate medical treatment, especially for MHT, should be taken to relieve the painful symptoms of menopausal women. Furthermore, the symptoms were essentially caused by estrogen deficiency in which case MHT could be the recommended measure to relieve them. Worldwide guidelines have allowed healthcare professionals to gain more clarity into the role of MHT, not only in the relief of troublesome menopausal symptoms, but also in the prevention of chronic diseases associated with aging (In our study, the MHELM intervention has significantly increased the energy expenditure of physical activities, especially in exercise physical activities, and improved the dietary status of women compared to those in control group. Meanwhile, similarly significant improvements were observed in the hormone drug group. Although our findings were consistent with previous studies which reported the effectiveness of lifestyle interventions, previous studies on lifestyle interventions were implemented mostly from the perspective of individuals (Access to the correct information about menopause can help women have more realistic expectations about this period and make better choices among treatment options for coping with menopausal symptoms (The effectiveness of the MHELM intervention depended on the MDT health management, useful lifestyle medicine theoretical framework and close progress monitoring. Thus, the success of our health education intervention would be attributed to a few reasons. Firstly, MHELM intervention was delivered by MDT from expertise of gynecologic endocrinology, sports medicine, music therapy, psychology, nutrition, pharmacy, osteoporosis. The core concept of MDT was patient-centered, individualized and continuously comprehensive treatment schemes for specific diseases based on the multidisciplinary team, which has been widely used over the world in recent years (There were also several limitations of this study. Firstly, we only evaluated the short-term effects of MHELM and long-term effects need to be assessed by extended study period with a scale-up sample. Secondly, in our study only subjective indicators were involved in the assessment from self-reports by questionnaire, suggesting that clinical indicators such as body composition, blood lipid and glucose could be taken in account in future studies.