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EVERYTHING
Stroke Recommendations (Finally) Focus on Risks for Women
What: The American Stroke Association introduced new recommendations to consider specific risks faced by women that could signal a stroke, including pre-term births, endometriosis, and early menopause. Previous recommendations were “sex-agnostic.”
Key line: “The number of Americans affected is vast. One in five pregnancies in the United States ends in one of these adverse outcomes. A woman who develops pre-eclampsia — serious pregnancy-related high blood pressure — is four times more likely to have a stroke, compared with a pregnant woman without the condition.”
Source: New York Times
Jill Biden Announces Over $100M in Women’s Health Awards
What: First Lady Jill Biden announced that $110 million for women’s health research was awarded in just a few short months via a federal government agency known as ARPA-H. The awards were part of the First Lady’s special initiative on women’s health and will go to 23 different groups to “tackle projects like creating a noninvasive blood test for endometriosis, assessing brain disorders with a noninvasive MRI imaging biomarker and a new way to assess women’s experience of pain by tracking eye movement.”
Key line: “’It’s time for investors, researchers and business leaders to have those conversations too, not as an afterthought, but as a first thought. Those kinds of questions belong in your research proposals, in your laboratories, in your pitch deck,’ Biden said.”
Source: Fierce Healthcare
BIRTH CONTROL
Birth Control Doesn’t Cause Abortions. That Isn’t Stopping the Message from Spreading.
What: USA Today has an excellent piece with medical experts explaining how birth control–like an IUD–does not cause abortions, but some anti-abortion groups still claim they do. And that message is making it unnecessarily hard for some women to get access to birth control in the first place.
Key line: “The public debate over birth control has consequences, data shows. Especially in the 13 states that have total abortion bans, many women think they no longer can access some forms of birth control. ‘A survey in 2023 found that almost half of women in full-ban states believe Plan B is illegal in their states,’ said Dima Qato, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Southern California who studies access to emergency contraception.”
Source: USA Today
MENOPAUSE
Weight Loss Meds for Menopause?
What: Good Morning America looks at women using semaglutide weight loss drugs, like Wegovy or Zepbound, to lose weight they’ve gained as they go through menopause. Losing weight can help “with the severity of other menopause symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats.”
Key line: “[OBGYN Jessica] Shepherd noted that women who take medications for weight loss during menopause should pay special attention to their diet and exercise in order to not exacerbate the loss of muscle mass and bone density already common among menopausal women. As we start to age, our bones are going to be weaker and we’re going to lose muscle mass, which is going to increase your risk for things such as osteoporosis and even falls,” said Shepherd.
Source: ABC News
ONCOLOGY
Beauty Products, Society’s Expectations, and Breast Cancer
What: An in-depth interview with Dr. Jasmine McDonald, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, about the role that beauty products—specifically hair straighteners used by Black women—could play in the increasing number of young women diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s a great discussion on how researchers think about and tackle these questions.
Key line: “So we’re talking about young age of exposure, repetitive exposure cumulatively. And this all plays a role in having an overburden of adverse chemicals like endocrine-disruptor chemicals, carcinogenic chemicals that increases your risk of having cellular mutation. And that cellular mutation being advantageous for tumor progression—or tumor initiation to progression.”
Source: Scientific American
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