I am DR. Katherine Rexrode, Women’s health in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the division of women’s. Health is committed to advancing our knowledge of how to best care for women, as well as how to conduct sex specific care that will improve the health for both men and women.
The division has several main goals: first, to advance clinical programs in women’s; health and sex; specific care to further our knowledge of sex differences in many diseases and best care for women to inform our knowledge and train the next generation of providers.
And finally, to really advance the cause of improving women’s, health, both nationally and globally, through advocacy and research, women’s. Health is, by definition, a very integrative and multi-specialty approach to care.
This really evolved from what our patients told us. They wanted that they wanted integrated care across organ systems across specialties, so our division includes faculty from internal medicine from obstetrics and gynecology from psychiatry and psychology neurology surgery in an attempt to provide coordinated research and care for women.
So our division does research on a large number of topics related to women’s, health and sex differences. We can think of this research program as looking at factors that exclusively affect women, such as pregnancy, complications, preeclampsia, which is high blood pressure during pregnancy, and it’s, long lasting impact on heart disease and stroke, or we also look at conditions which might Predominantly affect women such as depression, which is much more common in women and its effects on things like cognitive function and future cardiovascular disease.
Finally, we have research programs that look at how sex differences in certain diseases are manifest. For instance, the fact that diabetes is a stronger risk factor for cardiovascular disease in women than men, and we have research ongoing that looks at metabolic differences between a men and women to see if we can discover why those differences might occur by looking at these factors, We really have the potential to advance the care for both men and women by better understanding disease mechanisms and implementing these through to clinical differences in care.
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