Women's Health Research Needs More Attention
Two very exciting things happened in the past two months, that made me feel like progress is being made in getting women’s health into the press through a traditional lens! It’s about time! Small feats, and the journey ahead is long, but very exciting nonetheless.
1) Economist: The Economist published an article in the Science & Technology section about sport injuries. I was extremely thrilled to see this article. It might seem like a small achievement, but I was very happy because the article was not framed as an article about women’s health. The article discusses how the number of ACL injuries are growing, noting that they are growing specifically amongst women. What does this mean? When ACL injuries were looked at separately in women and men, researchers uncovered that physiological differences (including the menstrual cycle) affect the likelihood of women to injure their ACL. Why is this important? Now we can start to understand how to best train women to avoid these injuries. So simple of a conclusion, yet so easily overlooked for years! This article literally made my month.
2) Nature: The Nature Editorial board published an Editorial about the need to invest in more research in women’s health, and not only for conditions related to reproduction. According to the board: “the relative dearth of women on grant review panels and scientific advisory boards has meant that few of these decision makers have direct personal experience of women’s health needs or research gaps...Now it is up to other funders, researchers and journals to amplify the impact of this change by taking care to report sex-specific data in publications.” The call out how there is a lack of research on fibroids (affecting 1 in 8 women), women are 1/3 of the participants in clinical trials related to cardiovascular disease, and studies about sport injuries need to make sure to have an adequate number of female participants. Most importantly they call out that: “the study of health and disease in women should not be limited to conditions that affect only women. Conditions such as type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease affect men and women differently. Such diseases must be studied in both men and women, with the recognition that diagnosis, prognosis and treatment might need to be different between the sexes.” Now we just need to hope Nature and other leading journals actually showcase this agenda and start to push forward this kind of research in their publications.