Keeping the Women we Love Healthy

The Doris Howell Foundation held its first Luncheon Series with the lecture “ Understanding the genome 10,000 experiments at a time: applying genomic approaches to understand autoimmune disease in women" with Sonia Sharma, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Division of Cell Biology, La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology and Director of the Institute’s RNAi Facility. Although the title sounds intimidating,  the fact is autoimmune diseases affect women to a much greater extent than men (See Table). Currently in the US 12 million women and 4 million men are struggling with autoimmune disease; not to mention that research on autoimmune diseases in women has been scattered and unfocused, partly because of the fact that symptoms are often confused with other conditions. For reasons that are yet not fully understood, autoimmune diseases affect more women than men. Dr. Sharma pointed out that women have higher immune reactivity and higher numbers of certain immune cell popula...

Perceptions about hormones, remotes and phones. Understanding the differences between men and women has everything to do with the hormones produced in our bodies, and nothing to do with stereotype differences; despite the endless gender jokes we are subjected to.  In other words, there IS a reason why we act like we do. In today’s world, the word 'estrogen' is automatically linked to women and mood swings; in addition to being the perceived culprit of depression and anxiety.  Women's hormonal changes during their cycles were the reason why women were not included in clinical trials until 1993. Men, on the other hand, are directly associated with the word 'testosterone'. Drive, competitiveness, gender expectations and what seems to be a ‘simple solution’ to pretty much every problem appears to be testosterone-based. So the next time we are facing ‘difficulties’ with our significant other, remember that there IS a reason why we act like we do: hormones.  B...

Deepika Suresh  Just a short time after she presented her field of research at the Foundation's lunch last May, Deepika Suresh was invited to present the progress of her work at the UCSD Summer Research Conference last week. . When she applied for the Foundation's scholarship, she mentioned that her priority was to learn all that she needed in order to succeed in medical school and ultimately her profession:  "I started in a research lab my first week of freshman year, eager to learn about what research entailed and how I could make my mark in the scientific world". And we are proud to say she is doing just that!  She reached out to us to tell us a little about the progress of her work. "My research project for this summer involves developing an education intervention on genetic risk assessment in young breast cancer survivors (YBCS).  My objective is to develop content about genetic risk assessment in YBCS for a web-based survivorship care plan that my...