It’s a sadly common occurrence. A female walks into her doctor’s office but leaves with little to no relief. Maybe he’ll give her suggestions to switch birth control pills or “stop stressing so much”. Maybe the doctor will admit that knowledge is limited when it comes to women’s health. If she is unlucky, she’ll leave the office feeling like she’d somehow imagined her symptoms. Because of the limited research into their anatomy, there’s sometimes nothing for women to do but struggle and hope for a miracle.
The history of female hysteria
For a long time, women’s health was misunderstood and dismissed, and no condition proves that better than female hysteria. It is one of the most famous cases of a female-specified disorder that dates back centuries. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, doctors used it to diagnosis symptoms like anxiety, insomnia, irritability, loss of appetite, nervousness, impulsivity, swollen abdomen, shortness of breath, and more. Doctors used “female hysteria” to explain a number of separate health issues — and onto women behaving “unseemly”.
As one can imagine, this catch-all label prevented women from receiving proper diagnosis and treatment. Fortunately, the American Psychiatric Association eventually redacted it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, according to Medical News Today. Unfortunately, the APA only dropped it in 1980.
The gap of knowledge in women’s health
Needless to say, medical research is behind on female-specific health conditions. Plus, present health knowledge lacks understanding of the effects of generalized medicine on each sex.
“For just about everything in medical science, we’re still very male-focused,” said Marcia Stefanick, an obstetrics and gynecology professor at Stanford, to SF Gate. “Our basic understanding is missing a key ingredient: the sex difference.”
Male-focused research
Historically, women couldn’t become medical researchers, which definitely contributed to this problem. Nevertheless, females make up about half of the population. And still, fundamental and preclinical research tend to “only focus on male humans, animals, and even cells, according to researchers Severine Lamon and Olivia Knowles of Deakin University on the Conversation.
The rarity of women’s health studies
Only 6% of research studies use only female participants. Lamon and Knowles explain that “the main reasoning is that females are a more ‘complicated’ model organism” compared to male specimens. “The physiological changes associated with the menstrual cycle add a lot of complexities to understanding how the body may respond to an external stimulus, such as taking a drug or performing a specific type of exercise.” This makes studies with women more expensive, restrictive, and time-consuming to conduct.
Male and female anatomies
Lamon and Knowles state that men and women are physiologically different when it comes to hormones, genetics, etc. “There’s also emerging evidence from our research team that sex differences impact epigenetics: how your behaviors and environment affect the expression of your genes.” In other words, medical research conducted on males could have an entirely different effect on females.
Delving into women’s health issues
Fortunately, these physiological differences are becoming the focus of many new studies. There’s a long way to go when it comes to improving treatments for menopause, postpartum depression, PCOS, endometriosis, period cramps, breastfeeding difficulties, pregnancy complications, amenhorrhea, ovarian and breast cancer, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, dyspareunia, vulvodynia, and other female-specific ailments. But the medical field has already made fascinating strides.
ADHD in women
ADHD used to be predominantly diagnosed in boys. However, the number of women with ADHD seemed to increase suddenly within recent years. This is because experts are discovering how ADHD manifests itself in females. ADHD is often associated with hyperactivity. However, there’s also a subtype called inattentive ADHD. From an outsider’s view, the signs are more subtle, including forgetfulness, disorganization, and difficultes with starting a task and seeing it through.
Women are more likely to have inattentive rather than hyperactive ADHD. Many have never realized they had it all their lives. “They’re more likely to be seen as daydreamers, or lost in the clouds,” said Julia Schechter, co-director of Duke University’s Center for Women and Girls with ADHD, to National Geographic. “Their symptoms are just as impairing, but can fly under the radar.”
Menstrual cycles reshape the brain
Only a small fraction of brain-imaging health research is conducted on women. This is why it took so long for scientists to make a major discovery: menstruation reshapes the brain. Many women feel like they just have to endure their period symptoms without fully understanding why they are occurring. One of the most common symptoms is mood swings caused by the ebb and flow of sex hormones during menstrual cycles.
But these hormones do more than make people more prone to cry. They reshape the brain, particularly the regions that control memory, emotions, behaviors, and communication. The studies on this topic haven’t linked the reshaping to period symptoms, but they open the doors for further research into female neuroscience. And it’s about time, since 70% of Alzheimer’s disease patients and 65% of depression patients are women, according to Nature.
More than ‘morning sickness’
Nausea and vomiting during pregnancy is common and therefore not a big deal. Until it is. Downplaying the difficulties of morning sickness (a misnomer since its symptoms could occur at any time) can prevent people from seeking treatment for hyperemesis gravidarum (HG). This condition causes severe, debilitating, and ongoing nausea and vomiting that could become life-threatening. It affects about 2% of pregnancies and people suffering from it may be dismissed as “hysterical” or told “morning sickness is normal”.
Although there’s little research into this topic, studies have linked a specific hormone to HG and discovered how it causes the condition. This can lead to future effective treatments, but there needs to be more awareness of HG so doctors could recommend them.
New tools to save lives during childbirth
According to the World Health Organization, about 800 people die every day from childbirth and pregnancy complications, such as anemia, pre-eclampsia, and sepsis. Fortunately, scientific advances are discovering new ways to lower these mortality risks. For example, researchers found they can treat anemia during childbirth by injecting iron via IV, which is far more effective than oral iron tablets.
Additionally, the FDA approved the first blood test that could indicate whether a person is at risk for pre-eclampsia, a condition where high blood pressure can cause organ failure and death. Plus, clinical trials showed that a dose of the antibiotic azithromycin during a vaginal birth can reduce the risk of postpartum sepsis. This medication is typically used during cesarean sections to reduce infections. But it can make vaginal deliveries safer as well.
Frozen shoulder syndrome
This is a condition where the shoulder’s connective tissues become inflamed and painful, and continue to be so for years. The cause is unknown, making it difficult to treat, so it’s not surprising that three-quarters of its cases are female. (This is an unfortunate pattern seen in other conditions with predominantly female patients. Think depression, lupus, osteoprosis, thyroid diseases, IBS, TMJ pain, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, etc.)
Researchers found about 50% of women experience frozen shoulder syndrome during menopause. It may be linked to their diminishing levels of estrogen. One study found that people using hormone therapy that boosts their levels are less likely to have this condition. Although this discovery is still in its preliminary stages, it brings hope for people struggling with frozen shoulder syndrome, in addition to those who may be entering menopause soon.
The cure for hot flashes
Like morning sickness during pregnancy, hot flashes during menopause are often dismissed as being “par for the course”. But this mentality undermines how debilitating hot flashes can be. Fortunately, scientists have uncovered how plummeting estrostrogen levels cause hot flashes, a symptom that affects about 80% of menopausal women. It often comes alongside fatigue, dizziness, sweating, anxiety, and heart palpitations, striking several times a day and lasting for four years on average.
Fortunately, studies are uncovering how menopausal hormones interact with the part of the brain that controls temperature. So companies are working on drugs to block those neurons, stopping the symptom before it begins. Advancements for like these are long overdue for women’s health conditions.