Global Health 50/50 recently released its 2024 global report entitled Gaining Ground? The report analyzes the gender-related policies and practices of over 200 global health organizations that wield immense influence, control billions of dollars annually, and shape global discourse on social and political priorities. The report provides a critical examination of the organizations’ leadership and power landscape in their pursuit of gender equality.
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The Office of Autoimmune Disease Research (OADR-ORWH) and Office of Research on Women’s Health are excited to announce the publication of “Coordination and Collaboration to Support Exposome Research in Autoimmune Diseases,” a new article in Arthritis Care & Research, the official journal of the American College of Rheumatology and the Association of Rheumatology Professionals.
Congratulations are in order! The NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health announced Jillian Joyce and Alicia Cole as the winners of the travel award for the Menopause Society 2024 Annual Meeting. The award provides these two junior investigators up to $3,000 each to defray the cost of attending the annual meeting from September 10 to 14, 2024, in Chicago.
Leaders from the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH), Director Janine Clayton, M.D., FARVO, Deputy Director Vivian Ota Wang, Ph.D., FACMG, CGC, Associate Director for Interdisciplinary Research Elizabeth Barr, Ph.D., and Associate Director of Clinical Research Sarah Temkin, M.D., presented on a panel at the 2024 AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting. The panel presentation explored the breadth of ORWH and NIH research and programming on key issues in women’s health.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has pledged $27.5 million worth of funding opportunities to research programs aimed at improving women’s behavioral health across the United States. The funding opportunities will expand access to women’s behavioral health services and enhance the capacity of providers to identify and address mental health conditions, substance use, and gender-based violence.
In June 2024, ORWH and NIGMS hosted the first “NIH Symposium on Women’s Health Research in the IDeA States.” The event brought together field experts to discuss a variety of women’s health research–related topics, such as maternal health and lifestyle during pregnancy, the impact of mental stress on the female heart and cardiac system, and the success of nanoparticle therapies on maternal health outcomes. Explore these topics and much more in the newly released IDeA States Symposium Program Booklet.
The most recent edition of Women’s Health In Focus at NIH explores women and mental health across the lifespan. The feature story highlights several areas of research on the biological and social drivers of women’s mental health. It describes how leading experts in the field are working to unravel the complex web of genetic, social, hormonal, and neurobiological influences on mental health disorders.
The Office of Autoimmune Disease Research in the Office of Research on Women’s Health (OADR-ORWH) released a NOSI to highlight interest in receiving applications that seek funding for the support of scientific conferences and workshops that will gather subject matter experts to develop and refine common data elements (CDEs) for autoimmune disease research.
A study co-led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute and recently published in Nature suggests that as some women age, their white blood cells can lose a copy of one of their two X chromosomes. Scientists have identified inherited genetic variants that may predict this phenomenon, which is called “mosaic loss of chromosome X” or “mLOX.” These genetic variants may play a role in promoting the multiplication of abnormal blood cells, which could lead to several health conditions, including cancer.
ORWH, in collaboration with NIH partners and other federal agencies, spearheaded the development of the NIH Policy on Sex as a Biological Variable (SABV) to encourage clinicians and researchers to consider SABV at all stages of the research process. The development of this policy stemmed from an over-reliance on male animals and cells in basic and preclinical biomedical research, which obscures our understanding of the impact an individual’s biological sex can have on health, processes, and outcomes.