What is Women’s Post-Reproductive Health, and Why is it Important?
Here’s how we’re making healthcare more inclusive.
“Women’s health” often brings up associations with periods, fertility, and pregnancy. We generally tend to forget that women’s cycles begin to end in their late 40s, and women nowadays spend more than 40 years in their non-childbearing years. At Caria, we’re on a mission to advance women’s post-reproductive health. But what exactly does that encompass?
Let’s first examine the more familiar concept of reproductive health. According to NIEH:
“Reproductive health refers to the condition of male and female reproductive systems during all life stages.”
This is a comprehensive definition, but when used in practice, we felt the term “reproductive health” was often exclusively used to refer to women’s healthcare relating to contraception, pregnancy, and fertility. But more than 50 million women in the US aged 40+ have health concerns that are unrelated to these issues. To communicate our vision of promoting women’s holistic healthcare beyond fertility, we selected the term “post-reproductive health,” which we define as women’s health relating to menopause, chronic & behavioral health, and longevity.
I personally became passionate about this mission during my graduate education at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; first studying sociology & demography and learning about the consequences of increased longevity, then working with my cofounder Scott on tech & innovation to improve health outcomes in later life. Being immersed in longevity research as a woman, I was to shocked learn how disparate our health outcomes are compared to men. Like most people, I was aware that women tend to have longer lifespans than men. But the story is entirely different when it comes to our healthspans, or the proportion of our years spent in good health.
According to researchers at the University of Southern California, women are not living healthier lives than men, despite living longer. The team examined life expectancy and disability rates in the US between 1970 to 2010. Their analysis shows that while both men and women saw lifespan increases, women spend a larger share of the additional years living with a disability. They found over the 30-year period that the time adults ages 65 and older can expect to live without physical or activity limitations (called active life expectancy) increased more than twice as much for men than for women. In short, women are more likely than men to develop a number of debilitating conditions in later life.
Why is that? The scientific community doesn’t have concrete answers just yet. This is likely in part due to women being neglected in health-related research up until the 90s. Since 1993, federal law has required women be included in NIH-funded research, but there’s still a long way to go. Women, and especially women of color, are still underrepresented in many research areas.
The lack of scientific understanding about women’s disparate and worse health outcomes doesn’t bode well, given the concerning statistics about the state of women’s post-reproductive health:
- Menopause: 1 billion women around the world are in menopause, and over 80% experience negative symptoms.
- Mental Health: Women ages 40 to 59 have the highest rate of depression (12.3 percent) of any group based on age and gender in the U.S.
- Cardiovascular health: Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States
- Brain health: Women have a 1 in 5 chance of developing cognitive diseases, compared to a 1 in 11 chance for men.
Despite these concerning stats, innovation for women’s health in later life has been practically non-existent. The femtech industry has made great strides in improving women’s care for menstrual health, fertility, and pregnancy (although there’s still a lot more work to be done there). But it has largely ignored health issues that affect more than 50M women in the US who are in their post-reproductive years. In fact, in most femtech reports this segment of women’s health is absent altogether.
Lack of research and innovation in this space means we have little to no solutions for significant health challenges that millions of women face in later life. But it’s 2020, and we think it’s time for things to change. For one, new generations of women entering their post-reproductive years are demanding better information and solutions, and we’re here to serve their unmet needs. The first step is to acknowledge that women’s health is fundamentally different after their reproductive years, and therefore deserves its own category. The second step is to fill the vacuum of data, research, and innovation with concrete action.
We’re starting where women start their journey — in perimenopause — by giving women accessible care, data-powered insights, and a community to better understand and manage their symptoms. But our long-term vision is to close the gender gap in healthcare, improve health outcomes, and advance research and innovation for women’s post-reproductive health. We plan to do that in 3 ways:
- Make care more accessible with tech
- Improve understanding of women’s post-reproductive health with data
- Support women entering or navigating this new phase of their health with education and community
If you also believe in this mission, let’s work together: partnerships@hellocaria.com
