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1450 turns · 1 hr 29 minOvaries are like a second brain. They talk to my heart, my bone, my muscle, my brain for sure, my liver. Almost every tissue in the female body is somehow connected to ovarian signaling. The message is that ovaries are the architects of health in female bodies, and also the pacemakers for aging. And so reproductive aging is really just intrinsic aging-
Mm
... in reproductive organs that impairs fertility or fecundity.
Reproduction, yeah.
Right? It just basically impairs your ability to reproduce.
Yeah.
Aging ovaries drives aging in the rest of the body.
Mm.
For women, understanding what your normal is across time is probably the most important and most powerful thing that you can do. Women are desperate for answers. How and why do ovaries age faster? That's the key question for female health. The idea that female bodies are noisy or that our cycles make things difficult to interpret, that's just bullshit. [dramatic music]
Jen, welcome.
Thank you.
So I wanted to start today with just some very high level statistics that I'd love you to tell me if-
Sure
... they're correct or not, because this is kind of frightening. Um, only around 8 to 9% of NIH research funding is dedicated to women's health research.
Correct.
Is that correct?
That's correct, yeah.
8 to 9%.
Somewhere, you know, it hovers. It changes every year, but it hovers around 10%.
Only 5% of health R&D funding goes to women's health.
I... Yes, I might even say 4%. Yeah, that's correct.
And of that, it says here 4% goes to women's cancers, just 1% towards all other female-specific conditions, menopause, endometriosis, PCOS, and infertility.
Well, it depends on, uh, it depends on which funding you're talking about. So if you're talking about private investment-
Mm
... um, it's, uh, for the last five years, you have to look at the historic data. For the last five years, that's a, you know, a- approximately in the ballpark, um, something like, uh, 4% of all the investment has gone to everything except female cancers, fertility and maternal fetal health. So that means that more than 95% of the investment has gone to those three areas, and everything else, quite literally everything else related to women's health is, is in that little tiny bucket. [laughs]
I mean, help me and the audience understand why that might have happened.
I mean, okay, well, I think-
Yeah
... I think at this sta- at this stage of the game, we're all, uh, familiar with the, the historical bias in research in terms of, like, sex bias towards male systems. Um, like historic underfunding, right? So the underfunding really leads to this massive gap in data that we have, and I, I think that, you know, until recently there was a real taboo around talking about female bodies, right?
Mm.
We didn't talk about pregnancy, we didn't talk about menstruation. You know, certainly from my mother and, and her mother talking to her would never have talked about, you know, any of these things.
Mm.
And so that's changed and, um, everything is changing in a positive direction, but-
Yeah
... and I would say I, I like to, um, a dear friend, uh, CJ Jenkins, likes to say, "Let's stop admiring the problem-
Hmm
... and actually just, like, fix it."
Deal with it.
Yeah.
Are we just,
Episode notes
Why do women spend the last 5–6 years of life in worse health than men — and what does it have to do with your ovaries? Only 8–9% of NIH research funding goes to women’s health research, and by some estimates as little as 4% of private R&D investment goes to anything outside female cancers, fertility, and maternal-fetal health combined. Meanwhile, cardiovascular disease risk can rise 2–4x almost overnight at menopause — a shift most women are never warned about.
In this episode, Chris is joined by Dr. Jennifer Garrison, PhD, a neuroscientist, Co-Founder and Executive Director of ProductiveHealth.org, who spearheads the science on ovarian health.
Most people — including doctors — have conflated ovarian aging with reproductive aging for decades. Garrison’s research shows they’re not the same thing: ovaries function as a signaling hub for the entire body, and when they decline, they take whole-body health down with them, independent of fertility.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why ovarian aging and reproductive aging are two different things — and why that distinction matters for your whole-body health
- What the research funding gap actually looks like, in numbers
- Why the 2002 hormone therapy scare was based on flawed study design — and what the data actually shows today
- Why oral estradiol carries stroke risk but the transdermal patch doesn’t
- What a landmark mouse