April ’24: Selected Women’s Health Updates

April ’24: Selected Women’s Health Updates

Here comes my collection of April women’s health updates. Let’s check together what has happened this month!

January 2024 Women’s Health Updates?

February 2024 Women’s Health Updates?

March 2024 Women’s Health Updates


  • April 3d, Women's Brain Health Initiative together with Brain Canada and Krembil Foundation will invest $3.3 million?in addressing sex and gender gaps in Canadian brain health research (below an example related to such research gaps).

In general, Canada has been pioneering a number of women’s health initiative lately, read here about the first self-screening cervical cancer plan launched in British Columbia and Femtech Canada launch.

  • April 9th, a study from Nature Communications analyzed outcome comparisions by sex in oncology clinical trials: out of 89,221 oncology trials, only 0.5% curated post-treatment sex comparisons. Sex difference in oncology trials is significant in some types of cancer where women have better survival rate while men have significantly less side effects.
  • April 10th, my deep dive into anemia. - Anemia is the 3d-leading cause?of years with lived disability in the world. Despite being one of the WHO’s 2025 global targets and in 2014 targeted to be reduced by 50% by 2025, it has only grown.?

Globally, in 2021, 31.2% of women had anemia compared with 17.5% of men. In the age group of 15–49, it’s 33.7% women versus 11.3% in men (The Lancet)

When present in pregnant women, it will most probably result in anemia in newborn children. Being anemic in the first years of life might cause neurological conditions, sleeping problems, delays in motor, speech and mental development.

Read here what can be done to address anemia.

  • April 20th, a team of researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara tracked 30 women’s cycles, documenting in detail the structural changes that take place in the brain as hormonal profiles fluctuate.

The results suggest that structural changes in the brain during menstruation may not be limited to those regions associated with the menstrual cycle (hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal-axis receptor-dense regions). As hormones fluctuate, gray and white matter volumes change too, as does the volume of cerebrospinal fluid. The result lay the groundwork for future studies around period-related mental health problems.

This advancement is notable as there has been very little research around women’s brain throughout the cycle. To give you an example: throughout the history, periods have been considered a shameful disease, debilitating all women 1 every 4 weeks, resulting into women’s ‘incapacity to work’. It was not until the 1930s that it started to be suggested that periods are not a disease and women’s mental capacity to perform is in fact not affected while on periods (hence, women might actually deserve equal pay at work compared to men).

  • April edition of the Lancet Digital Health: an ML model could accurately identify the risk of adverse outcomes in pregnant women in a study involving 8,800 women from different countries by the researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and King’s College London. The next step now is to develop an app for determining an individual woman's risk of suffering adverse outcomes.

Pre-eclampsia occurs in between 2% and 4% of pregnancies and is a leading global cause of maternal morbidity and mortality. It causes an estimated 46,000 maternal deaths, and half a million stillbirths and newborn deaths a year.

  • April 23d, a study analyzed 750,000 male and female patients hospitalized between 2016 and 2019 and concluded that women are less likely to die or be readmitted to the hospital when they are treated by female doctors.

The findings show 8.15% of women treated by female doctors died within 30 days. This is compared to the 8.38% treated by male doctors. For male patients, the difference in percentage between female and male doctors was only .08%.

April 24th, the 8-week prescription DTx by Curio that provides symptomatic relief for postpartum depression got FDA 510(k) clearance. The FDA approved MamaLift Plus as a prescription‐only digital therapeutic for patients aged 22 years and older in conjunction with clinician‐managed outpatient care. Earlier this month, Curio demonstrated efficiency in a 141-subject study.?

Read here about more evidence-based therapies for depression.

April 26th, UK startup Elvie, which develops women’s health products including a breast pump and pelvic floor trainer, raised £9.6m. Since launching in 2013, the startup has now picked up $136m, from backers including BlackRock, Octopus Ventures and the Business Growth Fund.?

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If you’d like to see more industry summaries like this instead of the posts starting with ‘I recently hired a candidate over 55’ that Linkedin seems to be actively promoting, put like on this post and click on the follow button on my profile.

Paolo Borella

Corporate Innovation | Venture Investments & Startup Acceleration | Helping grow the EU startup ecosystems

7 个月

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