Jennifer Garrison is co-director of the Center for Healthy Aging in Women at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
Jennifer Garrison is co-director of the Center for Healthy Aging in Women at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
Women’s health is a traditionally overlooked area of medical research. At the Center for Healthy Aging in Women at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, assistant professor and co-Director Jennifer Garrison aims to alter that paradigm. Garrison is also the cofounder and executive director of the related global consortium, now called Productive Health.
Founded in 2019, the center was the first facility in the world to study the ways in which ovaries are the driver of female aging. “Nowadays when I give talks to the general public I tell people that they need to stop calling ovaries reproductive organs,” says Garrison, who was closely involved with the study. “I think calling them reproductive organs has in some ways allowed people to pigeonhole all of women’s health through the lens of fertility and keep it small and make it a niche sub-category of medicine, when we’re really talking about half the population and their global health.”
The current reality is that women have longer life-spans than men, but shorter health spans, directly due to the fact that ovaries age more than twice as fast as the rest of the tissues in the female body. For Garrison, this realization about ovaries led to a period of grief and anger, both at the facts of the situation and the lack of funded research about how having a pair of ovaries affects the course of a woman’s life. “The idea is not to extend your lifespan but to extend the number of years you’re healthy.”
The question Garrison and her colleagues now face is what drives normal ovarian aging from birth onward. “It’s not about fertility; it’s not about menopause,” she adds. “Those are two downstream consequences of ovarian aging. If your ovaries aren’t working at any age, that uncovers certain health risks. If you take a 10-year-old girl and her ovaries aren’t working properly, she’ll run into issues going through puberty.”
The bottom line is, “for none of this, do we understand the way or how … the biggest issue is this data gap,” Garrison says. “We literally don’t have any data. It’s not like we’re a year behind, or 10 years behind. We are generations behind on understanding how female bodies work.” Garrison’s goal is to fund grants through philanthropy. “This is a pants-on-fire problem,” she notes.
To assist Garrison, Productive Health and the Center for Healthy Aging in Women in addressing this research gap in women’s health, make a donation at productivehealth.org.
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