Jeniffer Garrison’s Quest to Draw Attention and Funding to Female Longevity Research
2022 was marked by a greater focus on health care transformation, sparked in part by the many harsh lessons taught by the Covid-19 pandemic. This included identifying shortcomings in women’s health care, including gender bias and health inequities, that have long prevented women from receiving the quality of care they deserve. However, a topic that still remains largely under researched when it comes to women’s health is menopause. Women’s ovaries age prematurely at more than twice the rate of other organs. Yet while scientists like Jenniffer Garrison are relentlessly trying to find the answer to why that is, women’s health is still treated as a niche subcategory of medicine, garnering less than 1% of research funding and biopharma investment.
‘’While we have a long way to understand why women age as rapidly as they do once they approach menopause, what we do know affirmatively is that reproductive aging dramatically impacts women’s health’’, said Garrison in an exclusive interview with our team. ‘’For instance, as more women delay childbearing, it can lead to infertility, miscarriages, and birth defects. Ovaries also produce hormones such as estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, all of which are essential for overall health. Hormonal levels fluctuate erratically during perimenopause. During menopause, they collapse to approximately zero. These hormonal shifts cause a spike in the risk of developing diseases like dementia, metabolic disorders, and depression. Half of postmenopausal women develop osteoporosis, more than double the rate of men; menopause quadruples the risk for a cardiovascular event. Put bluntly, menopause makes a woman’s body age faster: indirectly by interfering with sleep cycles, and directly by speeding up cellular aging by at least 6 percent.’’ Considering that menopause is a condition that definitively impacts over half of the world’s population, Garrison calls for greater efforts to understand the biological variability when developing diagnostics and treatments for optimizing longevity for all sexes.
When we asked Professor Garrison about the biggest inhibitors standing in the way of our understanding of reproductive aging, she stated that ‘’the consequences of reproductive aging are profound, yet we don’t understand the most basic things about it—what sets it in motion, why it varies so much between individuals, or why it happens so early. Persistent societal taboos, systemic sex bias in biomedical research, and massive underfunding for research have limited progress in addressing these problems.’’ That the questions remain unanswered at such a basic level makes the task that Professor Garrison and her team have set out to achieve all the more challenging. However, she is hopeful that in 2023, multiple forces in society will finally converge to expand funding for female-focused research and leverage scientific breakthroughs to extend reproductive longevity.
Professor Garrison has almost single handedly anchored the movement to bring more interest and more importantly funding to solve the puzzle of ovarian aging for over a decade. She mentioned that ‘’over the past few years at the nonprofit Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity and Equality (GCRLE) we've engaged an army of scientists to innovate and build a sustainable, impactful research field around women’s health. These efforts will foster new collaborations and dialogue between industry and academic scientists that go beyond traditional models to accelerate discovery toward new products, diagnostics, and therapies for women.’’
2022 saw major scientific breakthroughs in the field of reproductive aging research, including the first-ever comprehensive aging ovary data set from humans, discovery of a new pathway that regulates ovarian function, and data showing that the ovarian microenvironment has a profound impact on egg aging. According to Garrison, in 2023, this scientific progress will continue apace, with the potential discovery of novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets for diagnosing and treating female infertility and menopause.
Understanding the aging of living organisms is the first leap towards altering ordinary biological processes that are at the heart of Dr. Garrison’s research. Her inquiry aims to understand the role of neuropeptides - a “class of signaling molecules in the brain” - in regulating and altering life processes of normal and aging living organisms. The detailed examination of this process, according to Professor Garrison, could help us not only influence the mechanisms of aging, but also improve the human health span - the number of years one leads a healthy life. The first step is to take control of that process.
The disruption of the balance and communication between the brain and the body might be the opportunity of establishing agency over how fast our body ages. If we are able to keep the fact that we are old a secret from our own bodies, that might help us delay the imminent decay of our health, slow down the aging process, and achieve more years spent in good health, specifically for women.
Every woman that enters midlife will experience menopause, there is no escaping it. Under the umbrella of longevity research, the Garrison Lab works on the intersectional topic of reproductive longevity, inquiring into the possibility of delaying and potentially evading the imminence of menopause. Modern women often defy what has been predetermined. The age to bear a child no longer fits the way one chooses to live and plan a family. Menopause further affects women’s ability to live the life they want. While thriving in their professional and personal life, tiredness, inability to focus, feeling of cold and anxiety accompany them as they navigate career and family life. Garrison’s research has set it as its goal to return to women the ability to choose and decide for themselves - how to live and when to bear a child. Menopause makes it hard for women to be present in the moment, and excel in work and at home on their own terms. Establishing control over this biological clock will bring women control over their own body and life and ultimately their agency over improving the quality of their life in their later years. This of course is a much larger undertaking than just extending a woman’s childbearing age - a message that seems to take center stage whenever Garrison’s work is talked about in the public domain.
Accessibility and equity is at the heart of Dr. Garrison’s work, driving change and yielding positive results. Her research on reproductive longevity addresses the universal gender disparity that is caused by the experience of menopause. The fear of menopause disturbs younger women, who worry that they might not be able to have a child later in life. During the prime years of professional life, women undergo a disruptive experience. Both physically and mentally, women experience immense pressure, and an inability to fully be present in the moment, work on projects and lead an active family life. Dr. Garrison hopes that through her work she can bring tangible, real-life change to the experiences of millions of women around the world, concerned about their ability to bear a healthy child after a certain age and take full control over their bodies.