ICYMI news for women
No TL;DR. Just the facts, ma'am. Ten recent headlines that matter to women.
Sunday Snippets is a perk for paid subscribers, released later for all viewers. We round up recent women’s health news that we haven’t otherwise posted.
In the news this week: FemTech takes on painful paps. Endometriosis tied to significant risk of autoimmune diseases. Go figure: it takes a woman to figure out the cause of severe vomiting in pregnancy. The study on 42,000 women1 that RFK Jr. tried stop holds significant, first-ever potential health info on women and aging; and stonewalling at the NIH against their own lawyers’ advice; and NIH website user warnings. New mental health research about women reveals barriers, dangers, and a 23% increase in COPD is strongly tied to women who often never smoked.
May is National Women’s Health Month: Keep an eye out for special screenings, information sessions and other events in your area. Take advantage!
Tip to get around paywalls: If you hit a paywall, try copying the URL into https://archive.ph. Give it a minute if there’s a lot of traffic.
If you missed a terrific NYT piece on 90-year-old Joan Darling (pictured on this post), bring her light and smile to your world, too. “It’s all about the quality of the experience,” she says, talking to a filmmaker who almost quit her career for her kids.
This week’s headlines
FemTech: first at-home pap test: For nine decades we said, “God, I hate pap smears!” but resolutely did it every year anyway to guard our health. FemTech said, “Seriously???” and here we go: the FDA approves first cervical cancer screening device that can be used at home. For now, it’s by prescription so doctors can screen for medical appropriateness as it rolls out in California.
Women’s health research: It’s not just us. Why doctors and researchers say Canada needs to change course on women's health studies.
We’re seeing government stonewalling like we’ve never experienced before. The Atlantic covers “Inside the collapse at the NIH.”
Finally…the cause for life-threatening vomiting in pregnancy: In the category of “If men had this, we would have figured it out decades ago,” thanks to a (female) geneticist, we finally know what causes this severe complication of (“it’s just something women do”) pregnancy—hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), and finding the cause is the first step to far better treatments. If you’ve had it, you will never, ever forget it. Kudos and a world of thanks to Dr. Marlena Fejzo!
Surprise! Doctors may gaslight when they don’t have a fix: Doctors often gaslight women with pelvic disorders and pain, study finds.
Click for the original study in JAMA.
We’ve never had a chance like this before, and we almost blew it: The average age of the remaining 42,000 (!) women in the WHI is 87 years., with over 500 centenarians (!!) We’ve never had health aging data like that before. It’s an incredible opportunity for studies on women and aging. No wonder RFK’s NIH cancelled it. What is a wonder is that they reversed course after worldwide pushback; some pieces are slowly coming back.
Over 50% of women experience barriers to mental health care: Access and coverage for mental health care for women, a study with over 5,000 female participants, sheds light on what types of mental health issues women have, and what it’s like to find help.
Partner violence: The same study found that one in five (19%) women ages 18 to 64 say they have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) in the last five years.
Wow…if this is verified in further research, it’s an astounding finding about the link of endometriosis to dozens of autoimmune diseases. The phenotypic and genetic association between endometriosis and immunological diseases.
Note this was a GWAS2 study: one that drew upon thousands of (anonymized) data sets from 23andme DNA data. The results from GWAS studies are revolutionizing medical research and treatments.
COPD in women: “We saw it more in men because we were looking for it more in men.” It’s time to recognize COPD as a women’s health issue.
And NIH websites now carry a user warning, courtesy of the current administration: “Due to reduction in workforce efforts, the information on this website may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the website may not be processed, and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries.”
DEI, you know.
Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) is a research method used to identify genetic variants associated with specific traits or diseases. It involves comparing the DNA of individuals with and without a particular trait or disease, looking for differences in the frequency of genetic variants (like SNPs) across the entire genome. The singular advantage of these cases is access to DNA from thousands of already-identified cases, versus trying to find them one by one.