Top journal’s special issue on women’s health casts spotlight on menopause and pain
Once-taboo terms including ovulation, endometriosis, and especially menopause have entered daily vocabulary and conversation, reflecting greater interest in and knowledge of women's health. Yet women remain poorly represented in clinical trials, and female health remains poorly understood compared with male health, with much attention still focused on reproductive aspects. That context led the journal Science to plan a special issue on women's health, published Thursday.
The issue was edited by an all-female team — Yevgeniya Nusinovich, Sacha Vignieri, Joana Osório, and Sarah Ross — who named political attacks on women's rights and health care, as well as funding cuts affecting research in this area, as urgent motives behind the planning. They said the importance of doing clinical trials specifically in women has gained recognition over the years and should continue to be elevated, especially as research funding cuts are targeted at this and other women-specific research, threatening the quality of women's future healthcare. The issue's introduction noted that biomedical science has come a long way and that it has become increasingly clear there are sex-dependent differences in many diseases that do not involve reproduction and that occur at all ages.
Beyond reproductive health, the issue features reviews of research aimed at highlighting recent findings on the impact of sex-dependent biological differences beyond reproduction, as well as deep dives into the latest discoveries about menopause and the pregnant body. Women experience functional pain at about twice the rate of men, with persistent pain in the pelvic area often becoming a debilitating factor in daily life. The issue takes stock of recent research that identified sex-specific mechanisms of pain. The review highlights the impact of sex hormones, immune-neural interactions, the gut microbiome, and the role of ovarian hormones in pain, while also highlighting the deficit in efforts to understand female pain. 'Women are desperately waiting for concrete answers that might help eliminate the common 'all in your head' approach to their illnesses,' the review authors wrote.
Another review focuses on the impact of XX and XY chromosomes on aging and disease, arguing that their impact is so significant that sex chromosomes should always be considered when developing precision medicine strategies. Other contributions do take on reproductive health: they call for rethinking menopause research and treatment with an approach more tailored to the individual; investigating the immune system's role in preparing for and carrying out a pregnancy; and considering the role of the ovary's postmenopausal function. Nusinovich, a senior editor at Science, said she considers research on post-reproductive — the excerpt cuts off there.