June ’24 and H1 2024: Selected Women’s Health Updates
Anastasiya Markvarde
Women's Health | Driving healthcare innovation & strategy | Startup advisory | Innovation Director
The first half of 2024 has gone by quickly! In this post I’m sharing a couple of women’s health updates from June and featuring the key points from 2024 H1. Let’s go!
Up to 60% of women experience sleep disturbances during menopausal transition, including difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep.
One more collaboration on perimenopause:
- In May 2024, Oura partnered with Clue and UC Berkeley to study the impact of perimenopause on women’s health. Oura will donate rings to the participants in the UC Berkeley study and will collect biometric data, including?heart rate,?skin temperature,?heart rate variability, and?sleep changes. The proposed study will use historical cycle data (cycle length and variability), a survey, Clue symptom tracking, and Oura data to help quantify when someone is entering perimenopause, and, if relevant, how far they are into their journey.
The report said data show that illnesses unique to men, such as enlarged prostate glands, tend to appear more in a man's 50s+. While conditions unique to females, including menstrual disorders, are common in women of working age, 20s+ age range. The report goes on to say that a society in which a woman can work comfortably is likely to be the kind of society that is desirable for everyone, including men.
If you are interested in which other countries prioritise women’s health, take a look at Canada that launched these initiatives in the past 6 months:
?- Women's Brain Health Initiative (WBHI) announced a new partnership with Brain Canada and Krembil Foundation that will see?$3.3 million?invested in addressing sex and gender gaps in Canadian brain health research
- A province-wide cervical cancer self-screening launched in British Columbia allows women to order a quick, easy and highly accurate test kit to use at home, and will be able to access a network of highly trained and compassionate medical professionals (self-screening for cervical cancer is available in Australia since 2022, see more below)
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- Femtech Canada initiative was launched to support women’s health ventures
Australia is considered to be a first-mover and one of the leading countries in the segment: a National Women's Health Policy was launched in Australia in 1989, and at that time Australia became the only country to have a comprehensive policy on women's health. See here the current strategy for 2020-2030.
The UK also has a national women’s health strategy for 2022-2032 with a concrete list of actions. Austria has an Action Plan on women’s health with 40 measures since 2018. In the US, Biden signed an executive order in May 2024 to expand and improve how the US federal government funds health research about women, calling on investment of $12 billion in new funding for women’s health research.
The study by Karolinska Institutet is the first of its kind to look at cardiovascular health after perinatal depression and included data on around 600,000 women. Among the women with perinatal depression, 6.4% developed cardiovascular disease compared to 3.7% of women who had not suffered with perinatal depression. This equates to a 36% higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Their risk of high blood pressure was around 50% higher, the risk of ischemic heart disease around 37% higher, and the risk of heart failure around 36% higher.
2 more points around cardiovascular health for women:?
- In May 2024, by refining MRI scans for women specifically, the researchers from the Universities of East Anglia (UEA), Sheffield and Leeds, were able to diagnose 16.5% more females with heart failure. The method to non-invasively derive the pressure in the heart using an MRI scanner has existed, but in women's hearts may respond differently to increases in pressure. Women suffer disproportionately from a type of heart failure where the pumping function of the heart is preserved but the ability of the heart to relax and fill with blood is impaired.This could have huge impact in the NHS, which diagnoses around 200,000 patients with heart failure each year.
- Signs of heart disease are attributed to stress more frequently in women: in the 2008 study involving 230 internists and family physicians, only 15% diagnosed heart disease in a woman vs 56% in a men. Women got fewer cardiologist referrals (30% vs 62%), and prescriptions of cardiac medication (13% vs 47%).
And here you can find some of the highlights from H1 2024:
Stay tuned for more interesting women’s health news and summaries in 2024!