WASHINGTON — Half of the population will go through menopause, the significant hormone shift women experience in middle age. Yet doctors, public health experts and lawmakers agree that more research into and education about menopause is needed.
“I think that investing in this way will have major, major impacts on… the way that women are able to stay in the workforce during this time or the way that our society supports women,” said Briana Rockler, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Wisconsin’s Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin is among a bipartisan group of women lawmakers who have introduced a bill to increase menopause research.
“It’s our responsibility to come together and to reverse that stigma to help millions of women get the care that they deserve,” she said at a recent press conference.
The bill would allocate $275 million dollars over five years, with the biggest chunk going to the National Institutes of Health to support menopause research. Millions will also go toward raising public awareness and training doctors on treatment.
“A lot of OB-GYN training focuses on younger women, people who are pregnant or trying to get pregnant,” said Dr. Laura Bozzuto, an OB-GYN and the co-director of UW Health’s menopause clinic.
Bozzuto said medical students and residents often are shortchanged when it comes to instruction about menopause.
In a recent survey by The Menopause Society, only about 30% of responding obstetrics and gynecology program directors reported having a menopause curriculum in their residency programs. Several agreed that the programs needed more menopause educational resources.
Bozzuto said the federal dollars could be put toward newer studies, so doctors can better understand how to treat menopause.
“A lot of patients who were studied were kind of non-Hispanic white women,” Bozzuto said. “So expanding the different groups of women who are experiencing menopause, having more understanding of how different women experienced menopause and how those treatments might affect them, would be helpful for so many more.”
One health sciences professor said the bill sends a signal to existing institutes of health, university-based researchers and professional associations that have overlooked menopause, that it’s time to focus on it.
“Despite the fact this involves half of our population, and has unquestionably difficult, debilitating effects for many, it still is not something that has commanded the kind of standard attention that you would see for things that are much more life threatening,” said Tom Oliver, a professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
That could all change now, with female lawmakers on Capitol Hill taking the issue into their own hands.