Women’s Health Gets A Closer Look

When Virginia Marsh was a younger woman in her 50s and began experiencing problems common to menopausal women, she wanted to know why.

She recalls calling her doctor with a complaint and being advised to “just drink lots of water.”

But that wasn’t enough for Marsh. She wanted to know what was going on with her body and why. And why drink all the water? What was that supposed to do?

“That’s just the kind of person I am,” said Walsh, now 74. “I needed to have a reason for things.”

Now Virginia’s daughter, Marie Marsh, 51, has some of the same questions her mother had asked 20-plus years ago.

In her job as executive director of a high-profile non-profit organization, Marie Marsh’s life is a constant whirlwind of intellectual and managerial demands. But the “harrowing” symptoms of menopause sometimes left her in a mind-body split. Her mind was willing; her body was not.

“I just thought, ‘Oh great.’ Men age gracefully. And now here’s another example of what some would just call women’s inability to cope.”

The truth is: Women long have lacked concrete reasons and solutions for many health concerns particular to their gender.

Why, for instance, do women generally develop heart disease much later than men and almost always in their post-menopausal years? Could estrogen protect the female body? And why does heart disease in women often go undetected and untreated until the disease has become severe?

Likewise, what causes breast cancer, which one in eight women can expect to develop sometime in their lifetimes?

And although we know that good calcium intake in the teens and 20s protects women from osteoporosis, what about older women? Can they, too, stave off the crippling effects of this debilitating disease?

Answers for all of the above:

We just don’t know.

Many of the answers elude us today because women historically have been excluded from many clinical trials on diseases most affecting them.

“The assumption was that women were just like men, but we now know that isn’t true,” said Dr. Mary Haan, an epidemiologist and researcher at the medical center at the University of California, Davis.

Liability concerns about studying women during their childbearing years also caused their exclusion from some studies, Haan said. Others worried that women’s hormonal cycles are so varied that including women would complicate studies.

But times are changing.

Now women like the mother-daughter Marshes are participating in the Women’s Health Initiative, the largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted on women’s health. By the time the 15-year National Institutes of Health study concludes, the program will have monitored 163,000 post-menopausal women nationwide to determine how diet, calcium, vitamin D and hormone therapy might prevent heart disease, cancer and bone fractures in women.

These problems were targeted because heart disease, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, osteoporosis and bone fractures are the health problems that cause the highest rate of women’s deaths and disabilities today.

Haan, a principal researcher in the study, hopes the findings will generate better overall medical treatment for women.

For instance, heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women, “but misdiagnosis is more common in women than it is in men,” Haan said. “The symptoms seem to be different. We don’t really know why that is. … But part of it may be gender bias. Women are more likely to be classified as having psychiatric problems.”

It is not lost on most of the women that participation in the study will benefit mostly future generations of women. If they don’t see themselves as pioneers, they should.

To Virginia and Marie Marsh, that’s a plus. “Doing for others” is a common thread through both of their lives. Virginia, a retired registered nurse, now does volunteer genealogical research for Sacramento’s historic cemetery; Marie is executive director of Sacramento’s Child Abuse Prevention Council.

The beneficiaries of this study also are the fathers, sons, husbands and brothers of women who will see their loved ones live fuller and healthier lives.

“Women are a very important segment of society,” Virginia Marsh said. “We need to understand why their needs are different and take care of them.”

And not just on Mother’s Day.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Diana Griego Erwin McClatchy News Service