Latest news with #WHI
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Health
- Forbes
The Multibillion-Dollar Market Corporate America Is Missing Out On
Women's health sectors encompass a $360 billion ghost market in the U.S. Investors are overlooking a multibillion-dollar market, and no, it isn't crypto or AI. Amboy Street Ventures' recent 'Ghost Market Report' uncovered an untapped market for women's health, and it's worth $360 billion. According to Amboy Street Ventures—a venture capital fund focused on women's health—this multibillion-dollar figure accounts for 'ghost markets,' or markets that don't yet exist within the sphere of women's health. The report indicates several categories in which women's health remains underserved and notes that, if these areas had more investment and support, they'd be sectors worth billions of dollars. These categories comprise key healthcare needs for women, such as menopause, healthy aging, sexual health, menstruation, contraception, LGBTQ+ health, maternal health and fertility. This research not only identifies a major investment opportunity in women's health, but also a significant gap between the care women need and the services currently available to them. A Deloitte analysis found that, while women require nearly 10% more health care services than men, only about 4% of biopharma research and development spending goes toward conditions specific to women. And last month, a landmark Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study examining age-related factors for women's health was nearly defunded. If women's health lacks sufficient research, it may stymie the development of emerging market opportunities identified in Amboy Street Ventures' report. Recently announced tariffs could also slow progress for the prospective multibillion-dollar women's health market. An analysis from the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC) found that the tariffs are predicted to increase the costs and shortages of medical supplies imported to the U.S. Consequently, tariffs may make medical supplies more expensive and harder to obtain for American businesses, including those focused on women's healthcare. They could also create barriers to profitable sectors in areas like menopause, fertility, aging, maternal health and other unmet market needs outlined in the 'Ghost Market Report.' Despite ongoing challenges, promising paths that promote stronger investment and progress in women's health are being forged. Last month, the Milken Institute announced in a press release that it will be launching a Women's Health Network to 'collate, elevate, and advance existing and new efforts across the women's health ecosystem.' Chaired by former first lady Jill Biden, the network aims to collaborate alongside research institutions, startups, businesses, investors, policymakers, philanthropists and communities to promote women's health initiatives. Efforts like those of the Milken Institute and Dr. Biden will be essential in creating more spaces, networks and investment opportunities within women's health. The multibillion-dollar women's health ghost markets could also offer opportunities for career mobility for women care workers. As previously reported, women make up the majority of workers in the healthcare sector. Yet women continue to be underrepresented in the industry's leadership roles, with men dominating the majority of the highest-paid healthcare jobs. By setting their sights on entrepreneurship and addressing unmet needs within women's health, women in healthcare can create opportunities for themselves to not only lead companies, but entire new sectors with incredible financial promise. Women's health isn't only an astronomical economic opportunity. As the 'Ghost Market Report' states, it's also 'a moral imperative.' Amboy Street Ventures' research makes clear that empowering women's health companies in underserved categories would not only create a multibillion-dollar market but would effectively 'create equitable systems of care' and 'improve health outcomes for millions.' Now is the time to create the accelerators, networks, funds and new businesses that support major areas still missing in women's healthcare. After all, investing in women's health goes beyond financial rewards, it supports the lives and wellbeing of half of the world's population.
Medscape
08-05-2025
- Health
- Medscape
After Near Miss, What's Next for Women's Health Initiative?
Dolores Verdona was in her 50s in 1974 when she responded to an ad seeking women to join a study on osteoporosis. Now 104, she is one of the oldest of more than 161,000 volunteers to have signed up for the Women's Health Initiative (WHI). Dolores Verdona Every year she fills out a battery of questions related to her health. She has worn devices that track her every movement, taken tests related to smells, and had more scans of her legs than she can recall. 'I'm proud to belong to it,' Veronda said in a recent interview. 'I hope that my little bit of help helped.' Narrow Escape Last month, that past tense construction appeared to apply to the WHI in general. For a brief moment, the US Department of Health and Human Services threatened to cut off funding for the more than 3 dozen WHI study centers, before quickly reversing course. The narrow escape has highlighted the continued need to fund research that follows cohorts of women like Veronda throughout their lifetimes. The women enrolled in the WHI when the study launched in 1992 are now between 75 and 109 years old. Among them are 574 centenarians, including Veronda, and 12,646 women in their 90s. The original focus of the project was to conduct the research needed to create strategies for preventing heart disease, breast and colorectal cancer, and osteoporosis in postmenopausal women. Researchers involved with the initiative say the remaining group of some 42,000 women is now an irreplaceable resource that helps clinicians better understand how women age. Their closely followed lives continue to answer new research questions that no other cohort can — but what this single group can do is limited. For this reason, some experts say now is the time to look ahead. While continuing to fund the WHI to its end, which would be in January 2026 at the earliest, they say the US government should also be building a new cohort of women who can inform what clinicians know about younger generations who have been exposed to risk factors, medicines, hormone therapies, and lifestyles that the participants in the original study were not. 'The reality is this is true that no cohort can answer the questions of the next as well as they can because everything is always changing,' said Marcia Stefanick, PhD, a professor of medicine and obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford Medicine, in Stanford, California, and the principal investigator of the WHI Extension Study. But 'to cut this study short before we have even been able to fully analyze the data we have would be a complete waste,' Stefanick added. 'We definitely have not run our course, and there is no way you can replicate this cohort.' Room for Both You can't get 20 years of follow-up without 20 years of data. Many of the new papers coming out of the WHI are ancillary studies that expand on previously published findings. These reassess research questions as the women in the cohort age or combine the findings of multiple trials and observational studies to get a clearer picture of how diet, exercise, hormone therapy, birth weight, and menopause affect cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and the risk for complications of COVID-19 in older women. But the centers are still collecting new blood samples, scans, and cognitive assessments from the women as well. 'We are still following what happened when women were randomly assigned to hormones or not. You can't get 20 years of follow-up without 20 years of data,' Stefanick said. The initiative has ongoing ancillary studies on topics ranging from cognitive function to supplements to physical fitness in old age. However, its long-term research on how temporary use of hormone therapy affects women for decades is typically considered the initiative's most notable contribution to physicians' understanding of women's long-term health. That research continues to inform clinical practice, said Rebecca Thurston, PhD, assistant dean for Women's Health Research at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, who is not involved with the WHI. In a 2024 review published in JAMA , researchers from across the country laid out how clinical trials conducted at WHI centers support uses for hormone therapy in a way clinicians help inform how they care for patients — for example, while hormone therapy can be a good treatment for menopause symptoms, it should not be used to protect heart health. 'That really helped provide a balanced and nuanced view about the use of hormone therapy for multiple indications but specifically for menopausal symptoms. I found it to be quite helpful from a clinical perspective,' Thurston said. The guidance came at an important time, she said. When researchers enrolled 160,000 women in the trial in the early 1990s, hormone therapy was seen as a panacea, with the potential to prevent heart disease, Thurston said. 'One of the things about hormone therapy specifically is that the pendulum has continued to swing in different directions as time has gone on,' she said. The notion that hormone therapy was a miracle remedy shifted after the WHI published the results of their randomized clinical trial. 'The WHI provided a really important counter to that enthusiasm that was really based on observational studies,' Thurston said. 'When they set up a clinical trial, it didn't show the benefits for heart disease.' In fact, the data hinted at an increased risk for heart disease and stroke for women randomly assigned to receive hormone therapy. Other research linked hormone therapy to an increased risk for breast cancer. 'Hormone therapy then came to be regarded as poison, so the pendulum swung maybe too far in the other direction,' Thurston said. What is occurring now is something of an evening out, she added. As the researchers explain, the clinical trials support using hormone therapy to treat symptoms of menopause but not as a prevention for heart disease. The WHI study used a specific type of progesterone, medroxyprogesterone acetate. Although still used to treat symptoms of menopause, it is not the only option. New studies will need to determine whether these long-term findings hold up for younger generations, who are taking formulations of hormone therapy that differ from those used in the 1990s. 'We need to set up a new cohort,' Thurston said. 'The Millennials are coming into menopause age now, and this is such a different time with access to information, access to misinformation, the health profiles of people entering the menopause transition are different today.' The WHI 'cannot do all things,' she said. 'It's set in a current era, in a certain cohort.' Although the WHI 'cannot do all things' for all women, Thurston said, it can still continue to provide information on women in the final decades of their lives. What makes the WHI irreplicable is not only that researchers continue to study these women into old age but also that they have a deep archive of biosamples, scans, and medical history collected from these women over the past 30 years. 'I'm seeing that a case needs to be made for why we need to do women's health research,' she said. 'Women are not small men; women are not men with estrogen. Women have unique and specific needs and physiologic factors that merits research.' The JAMA review also discussed what vitamin D and calcium supplementation can and cannot do, based on decades of data collected from the same women over time. Supplements can fill nutrient gaps for women who do not get enough vitamin D or calcium from their diets but do not appear to lower the risk for a postmenopausal woman, who does not have osteoporosis, fracturing her hip. Decades of follow-up showed eating a low-fat diet rich in vegetables does not seem to prevent breast cancer, but it does appear to reduce a person's chance of dying from the disease. Some of the 40 WHI centers are set up to answer novel research questions, such as how visceral fat affects people in old age, said Andrea LaCroix, MD, a distinguished professor of public health at the University of California, San Diego, and senior investigator for San Diego's WHI site. The focus of research in this phase is determining what factors allow women not just to live longer but to maintain good physical, cognitive, and mental health during the last chapter of their lives. 'Many other cohorts are now too small, but we started out with so many women that we are able to have a substantial number of women to study how we can help women live longer with their health intact,' LaCroix said. The answers to these questions can inform how clinicians treat and counsel patients not just on their habits in old age but in the decades that precede that phase of life. 'There aren't really studies of women — or men — in their 90s related to cardiovascular disease. The question is, how do we make our hearts last a long time?' LaCroix said. Time for a 'Modern Cohort' Despite their value, the clinical recommendations born from the WHI cannot serve as the last word for female health, Thurston said. Fewer women are having children. Cancer trends among young women are shifting. The foods they eat, the jobs they work, and the environments in which they live are different from those for women born in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. To build on what the WHI has established, the United States should invest in what LaCroix calls 'the modern cohort of the future.' Ideally, this database would look something like a combination of the UK Biobank, which continuously updates the data it collects on participants as new technology comes out, and the UK's ONS Longitudinal Study, a birth cohort study that has been recruiting new participants since the 1970s. Rather than defunding the WHI, LaCroix said the strategy should be to study the current cohort in the last phase of their lives while building up a new one that can replace these women in the scientific literature when they are gone. Including men in the cohort would allow researchers to better understand sex differences in health. She envisions a 'study of everybody that renews itself over time.' As people die, newborns replace them in the study, ensuring a representative sample of Americans — and their biospecimens and health histories — through time. 'I have been passionate about the need for that for a long time,' LaCroix said, noting that a study like that would ensure health researchers are able to study a representative sample of Americans as the nation evolves. 'If we had this, there would be much less need to fund individual studies of each demographic subgroup in the future.' And Veronda offers another reason to fund other, large-scale longitudinal studies: Being followed for so long by people who wanted data about her health encouraged her to live a healthier life. 'Whenever they asked me if I wanted to be in something, I never said no.'
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
HHS reverses course on canceling Women's Health Initiative contracts
(NewsNation) — The Department of Health and Human Services has reversed a decision to cancel contracts with the Women's Health Initiative, though NewsNation has learned WHI has not been made aware of the decision. On April 21, 2025, WHI said in a press release that HHS had terminated WHI Regional Center contracts at the end of their current fiscal year, which is September 2025. The WHI Clinical Coordinating Center would continue operations until January 2026, after which time its funding would remain uncertain. Their work focuses on research and data collection and says it has led to better health outcomes for women, especially those battling with chronic disease and cancer. As an example, they cite a trial that 'led to a dramatic shift in menopausal hormone therapy prescriptions, preventing an estimated 126,000 breast cancer cases and 76,000 fewer cardiovascular disease cases over the decade following the release of the results, saving an estimated $35.2 billion in direct medical costs.' RFK Jr. defends HHS job cuts, says 'We're not cutting scientists' According to WHI, the canceling of these contracts could severely limit research, including for the health of older women, as well as prevent 'opportunities for new discoveries and future scientific advancements.' Since curing chronic disease is one of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s stated goals with his 'Make America Healthy Again' (MAHA) initiative, NewsNation asked HHS why the contracts were canceled and what would be put in their place to ensure women's health remained a priority. In response, they said, 'These studies represent critical contributions to our better understanding of women's health. While NIH initially exceeded its internal targets for contract reductions, we are now working to fully restore funding to these essential research efforts. NIH remains deeply committed to advancing public health through rigorous gold standard research and we are taking immediate steps to ensure the continuity of these studies.' FDA milk quality testing program suspended after job cuts NewsNation asked WHI for a response to the news that the contracts were being reinstated and was told, 'While we would welcome the news that the decision on funding has been reversed, we have not yet received confirmation of this from Health and Human Services.' No word yet from HHS on when the funding will be restored, when WHI will be notified and who made the decision to cancel these contracts in the first place. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
25-04-2025
- Health
- The Hill
Trump officials reverse course, restore funding for women's health study
The study, called the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), was launched by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1991 to learn about women's specific health needs since medical studies before then used mainly men. WHI researchers at the initiative's four regional centers were notified this week that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would be terminating their contracts in September. The White House ordered HHS in early April to cut contract spending by 35 percent to make sure the department was using its funding efficiently. But HHS's decision to end the decades-old initiative's financial backing quickly received pushback from researchers and lawmakers alike. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted to X to say the reports of the initiative's funding freeze were 'fake news' and that WHI would continue to be financed by the department. 'We are not terminating the study. NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has himself used this study in his own research. We all recognize that this project is mission critical for women's health,' he wrote on X. An HHS spokesperson confirmed to The Hill that the department is currently working on restoring funding to the study so that its 'essential research' not be interrupted. 'NIH remains deeply committed to advancing public health through rigorous gold standard research and we are taking immediate steps to ensure the continuity of these studies,' the spokesperson said. More than 160,000 women signed up to take part in WHI's clinical studies in the mid-90s and there are more than 40,000 women who have taken part in the study initiative for decades. WHI's clinical studies have resulted in better treatment for women with conditions like cardiovascular disease and breast cancer.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Trump administration restores funding for major women's health study
The Trump administration has reversed course and restored financial support for a decades-old study on women's health. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the study, called the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), in the early 1990s to learn about women's health needs since most medical studies had been conducted on men. WHI researchers were notified earlier this week that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) planned to terminate contracts in September with the initiative's four regional centers in California, New York, Ohio and North Carolina. The Trump administration chose to cut the initiative's funding because the National Institutes of Health 'initially exceeded its internal target for contract reductions,' HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told NPR. The White House ordered the HHS earlier this month to cut 35 percent of its spending on contracts to ensure that the agency's funding is being used efficiently. The move quickly alarmed the scientific community and elected officials with many calling for the administration to reverse its decisions. 'If a program that costs $10 million a year has saved an estimated $35.2 billion in medical costs and improved the healthcare and lives of post-menopause women, it is not wasteful,' New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R) posted on social platform X. 'This decision should be reversed and a more thoughtful and deliberate approach to identifying savings must be implemented,' she continued. The initiative's clinical studies have resulted in more effective treatment for diseases like breast cancer and cardiovascular disease for women, according to the initiative's website. More than 160,000 women were enrolled in the WHI's studies in the mid-1990s and more than 40,000 are still participating in them. The HHS decided to renew its support for the decades-old study series late Thursday. And HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called reports on the agency's decision to withdraw funding for the initiative 'fake news.' 'We are not terminating the study. NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has himself used this study in his own research. We all recognize that this project is mission critical for women's health,' he wrote on X. An HHS spokesperson confirmed to The Hill that the agency is working to fully restore funding for the WHI and its 'essential research efforts.' 'NIH remains deeply committed to advancing public health through rigorous gold standard research and we are taking immediate steps to ensure the continuity of these studies,' the spokesperson wrote to The Hill. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
