Women's health: turning discovery into health

Janine Austin Clayton, MD, of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), explains how research is taking a multidisciplinary approach to studying women's health -- and uses science to discover new, life-saving treatments.

Transcript

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I would say the health of women is often overlooked as being perhaps distinctly different

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from the health of men. [MUSIC PLAYING] How I view the health of women is, everything that affects a woman from head to toe, all of it

00:15

considered at the same time in a kind of multidisciplinary cross-sector kind of way.

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Everything affects your health. Name me one thing that doesn't affect your health. Everything around us affects our health. And so I think of health as health

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everywhere, for everyone, every day. So how can we design an environment and promote a culture where health

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is valued, where sex and gender is just considered from the beginning? That's automatic. So what's fundamental, we now understand

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today, because we understand that sex affects health and disease, is both what's similar between men and women and what's different, and understanding why, which

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is actually the innovation. Can we understand the mechanisms behind that? Because that allows us to discover more.

01:00

And you know what we're about here is turning that discovery into health. Science teaches us new things.

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And we can change and adapt in response to that new information. We actually have seen significant reductions

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in cancer deaths, breast cancer in particular. Amazing. We've saved lives.

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Because of the Women's Health Initiative we've saved over 125,000 lives related to breast cancer.

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That's showing me the benefit of research when we ask questions. HPV vaccine, we are preventing cervical cancer.

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We're using all of our science, not just our life science, not just our medicine, not just our physiology, but our behavioral and social science.

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If, as a society, we could really get behind this health everywhere notion, we could do a lot better for everyone.