Read Specialized Women’s Health Fellow Dr. Alexa Fiffick’s column on the latest news on vitamin D.

Hormonal changes during the menopause transition have been shown to affect a woman’s gastrointestinal (GI) functions with some unpleasant results such as nausea, bloating, and abdominal pain. A new study suggests that a woman’s race/ethnicity and menopause status may partially determine the severity of these symptoms. Study results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). With the menopause transition, the level of estrogen decreases…

Margo Davis at the Cleveland Clinic Integrative and Lifestyle Medicine Department discusses how emotional eating tends to lead to overeating and choosing unhealthy foods. This can lead to obesity and depression if left unchecked.

A new study reports four specific factors — higher body mass index (BMI), smoking, arthritis and depressive symptoms — at age 55 are associated with clinically important declines in physical health 10 years later. "Age 55 to 65 may be a critical decade," said study co-author Dr. Daniel Solomon, of the division of rheumatology, inflammation, and immunity at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston."A person's health and factors during this period may set them on a path for their later adult…

Guest columnist and everyone’s favorite Department Coordinator, Ms. Rhonda Jackson, shares her insider tips on how to be prepared when scheduling your next doctor’s appointment.

Dr. Lin Yufang discusses how gut health can impact the rest of the body and how you can improve your gut microbiome and overall health.

Guest columnist Dr. Robert Saper of the Department of Wellness and Preventive Medicine at Cleveland Clinic discusses how studies show that yoga can help women with chronic pain and recurrent pain.

Researchers found that prunes can help prevent or delay bone loss in postmenopausal women, possibly due to their ability to reduce inflammation and oxidative stress, both of which contribute to bone loss.

New study evaluates prevalence of hair loss during the menopause transition and factors contributing to it, including obesity.

Attempts to develop an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s have met with little success. Researchers are increasingly turning their attention to detecting the disease early. The key to this strategy is to identify early, “modifiable” risk factors that doctors can target with drugs or other interventions. Researchers at the Paris Brain Institute in France have now found statistical associations between 10 health conditions and a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease up to 10 years later. Major…

A preliminary study finds women who enter menopause before age 40 are linked to a 35% higher risk of developing dementia later in life. Premature menopause, as it is called, occurs when a woman's ovaries stop creating hormones and the menstrual cycle ends by age 40. That's about a dozen years earlier than the typical onset of menopause, which is age 52 in the United States, according to the US Department of Health and Human Service's Office on Women's Health. The study shows a modest…

Having a long-term pet companion may delay memory loss and other kinds of cognitive decline, a new study has found. Pet ownership was especially beneficial for working verbal memory, such as memorization of word lists, according to the preliminary research. Owning household pets for five years or more produced the most benefit, delaying cognitive decline by 1.2 points over the six-year period of the study compared with the rate of decline in people without pets. Why did having pets for more…

AstraZeneca and MSD’s Lynparza (olaparib) has been approved in the US for the adjuvant treatment of patients with germline BRCA-mutated (gBRCAm) HER2-negative high-risk early breast cancer who have already been treated with chemotherapy either before or after surgery. The approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was based on results from the OlympiA Phase III trial presented during the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting and published in The New England…

Certified Nurse Practitioner Dana Leslie discusses the Intrauterine Contraception (IUD) and what women can expect, including the side effects, the benefits, the cons and the process of inserting an IUD.

Read Dr. Holly L. Thacker’s food as medicine themed column on healthy, nutrient dense food that may be stress reducing as well!

In this episode, Dr. Stetson Thacker, a Clinical Genomics Curator at GenomOncology and a previous PhD candidate in Dr. Charis Eng’s Lab of the Genomic Medicine Institute of Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, shares his insight into navigating the seas of scientific literature. We both worked with Stetson and mutually continue to agree that we haven’t interacted with someone who had a better handle on the lit than Stetson. So of course, we hoped to pull back the curtain on his tips and tricks through this conversation. We talk about methods for staying current, organized, and collected, as well as how to deeply retain the key takeaways from papers. Highlights include plugs for curating your Google Scholar reading list, incorporating Zotero as a citation manager, and downloading the GoodReads App for finding fun books to read!

Speaking of Women's Health guest columnist Dr. Sandra Darling shares one simple dietary change that can improve memory and other brain functions.

Pregnancy, long reproductive span, and older age at menopause are associated with a lower risk of dementia in women, according to a recent study. Inversely, hysterectomy, younger age of first birth, and younger or older than average age at first period were associated with greater dementia risk. The study suggests that reproductive and hormonal factors may be involved in dementia risk, but observed a similar association between the number of children and dementia risk in women and men,…

During the past 2 decades, Endocrine Today has reported on the latest developments in hormone therapy for symptoms associated with menopause. For its 20th year, the publication is taking a look back. Twenty years ago, findings from a pivotal study dramatically changed the public’s perception — as well as that of some health care providers — surrounding menopausal HT. According to the timing hypothesis, HT is safer for younger women who initiate it closer to the start of menopause and most…

Dr. Holly L. Thacker shares seven ways women can help prevent osteoporosis and have strong, healthy bones.