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PREGNANCY
Pregnancy Rewires the Entire Body
What: Pregnancy doesn’t just make your heart beat more or increase your blood volume – it “dramatically rewires every major organ” in the body. That’s according to a study of monkeys, and it surprised scientists to see changes not just in organs like the liver and heart, but also the skin and muscles.
Why it matters: Understanding these metabolic changes could lead to treatments for pre-eclampsia or gestational diabetes.
Source: Science
Black Women Less Likely to Get Epidurals
What: A study in Obstetrics & Gynecology finds that Black women are “about 10 percent less likely to receive [an epidural] during labor” when compared with white women. When researchers looked at measures of social inequity, the lowest-ranked locations provided epidurals less frequently to both white and Black women. But Black women were still less likely to get one.
Why it matters: Yet another piece of evidence detailing how racism pervades the practice of medicine.
Source: Columbia University School of Public Health
POSTPARTUM
Becoming a Mom at 45
What: A lovely, thought-provoking essay from writer Laura Barton on unexpectedly becoming a mom at 45, after years of trying through miscarriages and fertility treatments.
Why it matters: There are lots of good lines, but this paragraph stuck with us.
Three years ago, when I wrote about IVF, repeated miscarriage and terrible relationships, I realised that in so doing I had made myself part of a distinct social set: sad, lost, childless. People greeted me with a head-tilt and a tone of almost unbearable sympathy. This changed once I was pregnant. I felt a sudden rush of warmth from the world. I was no longer one of the sad ones, the career-focused, the selfish or the tragic. I was not exiled to the outskirts of the village. Instead I found myself welcomed back in, friendships rekindled, those I felt had dropped me once they became parents suddenly inviting me round for tea. I was, at last, one of them.
Source: The Guardian
ABORTION ACCESS
Photos from a Late-Term Abortion Clinic
What: A photographer from the New Yorker made regular visits to an abortion clinic in Maryland, one of the few dozen in the country to provide late-term abortions. She captured the health care providers at work, and the stories of the women who had traveled hundreds of miles to be there.
Why it matters: The photos are not the gory stuff of anti-abortion crusaders. Instead, they are of the human beings simply practicing medicine. They could be from any OBGYN office.
Source: The New Yorker
Public Universities in California Fail to Mention They Can Provide Medication Abortions
What: California’s public universities are required by state law to provide students with medication abortions at student health centers. But state data found that only 365 medication abortions were provided in the first six months of 2023, far fewer than expected given the size of California’s public university student population.
Why it matters: People can’t get what they need if they don’t know it exists!
Source: LAist via CapRadio
MENOPAUSE
Do At-Home Menopause Test Work?
What: At-home menopause tests are now a thing, and the Washington Post looks at whether they work. They find it’s kind of a mixed bag – some providers say it’s not necessary and to just talk to your doctor, others say it can be helpful for some patients to feel prepared before going in to see a health care provider.
Why it matters: Medical school training on menopause isn’t broadly comprehensive, and women can be dismissed when reporting menopause symptoms. We get those who want a test AND those who would rather just talk to the doc.
Source: Washington Post
CARDIOVASCULAR
Women Get Diagnosed With Anxiety, Depression When They Actually Have Heart Problems
What: A profile of two women, one elderly and one pregnant, who had serious signs of cardiovascular problems dismissed by health care providers. Even more enraging? “Dr. Philip Adamson, chief medical officer of Abbott’s Heart Failure Division, said women are often diagnosed with anxiety or depression when they are short of breath or experience fatigue — when the true culprit is heart failure.”
Why it matters: As we write often – heart disease is the number one cause of death of women in America.
Source: Fox News
ONCOLOGY
Op-Ed: Calling It ‘Breast’ or ‘Ovarian’ Cancer Isn’t Just Old Fashioned, It’s Possibly Harmful
What: An op-ed in Nature calls for changing how cancer types are classified, moving away from naming cancers for where tumors are located (i.e. breast, lung, ovarian) and instead classifying and treating them based on their molecular structures.
Why it matters: The authors argue that the current classification system limits patients to treatments tested on tumors in a given organ, when there is evidence that tumors across different locations of the body but with similar molecular structures could be effectively treated with the same drugs.
Source: Nature
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