Postpartum, chronic inflammatory conditions, and autonomic nervous system disorders are areas of women’s health that local medical professionals say are overlooked and need more research.
Santa Barbara-based Cottage Health hosted a collaborative research symposium earlier this month at the Ritz-Carlton Bacara with academic and medical professionals to discuss aspects of women’s health that don’t get enough research attention.
Amy Boddy, an anthropology professor at UC Santa Barbara, talked about how the postpartum period is under researched and women only get checked once, six weeks after giving birth.
“It takes months before things end up changing back to baseline, if we’re looking at biomarkers and measures and immune function,” Boddy said. “And we don’t know much about that, and we don’t know the variation where some women maybe take longer or shorter to return back to baseline, and it’s just severely understudied.”
Dr. Stephanie Handler, a urogynecologist at Cottage Surgical Clinics, said there needs to be a lot more attention on chronic inflammatory conditions in women, specifically endometriosis and bladder pain syndrome.
Dr. Courtney Stull, a rheumatologist at Cottage Rheumatology Clinic, said there has been an increase in women dealing with autonomic nervous system disorders like Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS).
“We’ve seen more of this since COVID; there’s been a lot more recognition of these conditions, not necessarily directly because of COVID, but I think there’s some link there,” Stull said. “But also just an increasing recognition of these symptoms, very bothersome symptoms, that are coming to attention.”
The women also shared their thoughts on artificial intelligence and the role it can play in research and health care.
Boddy was honest about her concerns around AI, particularly the impact it’s having on the environment and its information bias.
“Most research is done in men, and so if we’re training models, it’s going to assume a woman is a small man, and we’re not,” Boddy said. “I think it’ll be confident, and it’ll lie, and it’ll maybe send us down the wrong path.”
Stull spoke about how some clinicians benefit from using AI in the exam room to help with note taking while they talk to patients.
“That is actually a really nice thing, so that rather than being on the computer and typing during an encounter, being able to sit with a patient and listen and know that some of the details that I would not recall hours later, when I’m doing documentation, are being captured,” Stull said.
Brain Health Initiative at UCSB
The symposium also included a talk from Dr. Emily Jacobs, a neuroscience professor at UCSB, about her research on women’s brain health.
Jacobs said scholars are lacking important data on women’s brain health due to a lack of research.
“We don’t have the data we need to predict postpartum depression before it manifests,” Jacobs said. “We don’t have the data we need to understand the effects of preeclampsia on later life brain health, even though we know epidemiologically that preeclampsia is tied at increased risk of vascular dementia that doesn’t show up for 30 years.”
Jacobs also noted that 80% of women experience neurological symptoms during menopause, which is why she was part of launching the Longitudinal Menopause Project.
The project is part of the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative, a UCSB-based research center advancing women’s brain health research.
The Longitudinal Menopause Project is a multi-site study across the UC system examining brain health and menopause.
“There’s so much about the biology of menopause that we don’t understand yet, and it’s not because women are too complicated,” Jacobs said. “It’s not because menopause is like the Gordian Knot of biology. It’s a reflection of the fact that we have under invested in a phenomenon that will affect half of the world’s population.”
It’s not just research that is needed, Jacobs said, but policy work as well because only about 30% of medical programs include menopause in basic science curriculum.
Despite the challenges, Jacobs said she’s excited about the work being done by the Women’s Brain Health Initiative (WBHI).
“When I think very audaciously about where I’d like the WBHI to be in five or 10 years, I’d like to see the UC become the global epicenter for women’s brain health, with research and policy and training arms that bring the best minds to our collective campuses to make breakthrough discoveries,” Jacobs said.
The symposium was hosted by the Cottage Health Research Institute.
