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EVERYTHING
How the White House Women’s Health Initiative Started
What: First Lady Jill Biden on Thursday told the story of how the White House Women’s Health Research Initiative got started: “Earlier that morning, I’d read in the New York Times that our country loses $1.8 billion in working time every year to the menopause symptoms that upend women’s lives. It struck me – I’d experienced those kinds of symptoms too, so had many of my friends, but, I thought, that’s the way life is, isn’t it? And then, that afternoon, Maria Shriver, the former First Lady of California, came in for a meeting. She wanted to talk about women’s health. She told me that it’s not just menopause symptoms that don’t have enough treatment options. It’s all of women’s health – for our whole bodies, for our whole lives.”
Why it matters: “….It’s a problem that’s so simple – yet often ignored: women’s health is understudied and research is underfunded. As a result, too many of our medications, treatments, health products, and medical school textbooks are based on men.”
Source: WVTM
FERTILITY
Map That Ovary
What: You can’t build an artificial ovary without a map. So researchers at the University of Michigan created the first cellular map of a human ovary.
Why it matters: “’You cannot build something if you don’t have the blueprint,’ said biomedical engineer Ariella Shikanov, PhD, associate professor at University of Michigan, who helped create what she and colleagues call an atlas of the ovary. ‘By creating a map or an atlas, we can now follow what nature created and engineer the building blocks of an ovary — and build a nature-like structure.’”
Source: Medscape
PREGNANCY + POSTPARTUM
Just 50,000 Extra Calories for a Baby
What: How many calories does it take to grow a baby? It only took until 2024 to figure it out: 50,000 calories over the course of nine months. Previous estimates were “lower because scientists generally assumed that most of the energy involved in reproduction wound up stored in the fetus.” But new research found the “energy stored in a human baby’s tissues accounts for only about 4 percent of the total energy costs of pregnancy. The other 96 percent is extra fuel required by a woman’s own body.”
Why it matters: “And yet what surprised [an evolutionary biologist] even more was that Dr. Marshall’s team was the first to pin down these numbers. ‘It is disarming,’ he said. ‘You think, someone has done this before.’”
Source: New York Times
BIRTH CONTROL
Birth Control: It’s Annoying, It’s a Rightwing Target, It’s Effective
What: We live in a world where many things can be true at once: the online discourse around birth control has been filled with misinformation (utilized by the powerful, like Elon Musk, to push people to the right), while it can be annoying and difficult to take, and yet, it remains an historically easy way to avoid being pregnant. And it turns out that despite the online backlash, more and more women are taking the pill, according to the New York Times.
Why it matters: “An analysis by Trilliant Health, an analytics firm that provides health care companies with industry insights, found that usage has been steadily trending upward in the United States; 10 percent of women had prescriptions in 2023, up from 7.1 percent in 2018. …Even among those aged 15 to 34, who would be most likely to see negative social media posts, Trilliant found prescriptions had increased.”
Source: New York Times
MENOPAUSE
All Fours: The Menopause Novel
What: A review of Miranda July’s new “menopause” novel, All Fours: “As a child of the 1980s, she certainly felt warned about the contours of puberty and menstruation by Judy Blume and others. But as she reached middle age, where were all the books and movies about what happens next, when those monthly periods slow and then stop? ‘I kind of couldn’t believe the void when I got there,’ July says in an interview. ‘It’s this kind of transition, like birth or death, so you would expect books and songs and operas and plays throughout all time on this.’”
Why it matters: “’If men went through it, she adds, ‘we would be referencing back to the perimenopausal texts of the 1700s or the ‘30s.’ Instead, she found herself asking her friends about it—often in hushed tones, ‘kind of whispered’—and no one, not even the most devout feminists, seemed to know more than she did.”
Source: Wall Street Journal
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