New center a leader in women's health

Research on women's health issues and reproduction has been done at the the University's Medical Center for more than a quarter of a century. But until this spring, women's health and reproductive research efforts had not been consolidated. The Medical Center's newly-created Center for Research on Women's Health and Reproduction brought women's health research together and is now one of the nation's largest and most diverse in the field. The center will receive more than $5 million in funding each year from the National Institutes of Health, according to Associate Med School Dean Jerome Strauss, who heads the center. "The concept of the center is to build a more formal umbrella over these programs and to expand them with more resources and space committed by the institution," Strauss said last week. "We've been doing [women's health research] for 25 years . . . the Medical Center has been one of the world leaders and one of the few early on which was dedicated to the care of women." The Center will conduct its research on female-related diseases and disorders, including several aspects of reproduction. Infertility, implantation, contraception and pregnancy-threatening diseases are all research areas, Strauss said. The center will also serve as a training center for the medical community. Strauss said that one of the center's research goals is to identify the causes of endometriosis, a major cause of infertility and debilitating pain in women. Other researchers are interested in pregnancy-related diseases, such as maternal diabetes, which affect the fetus. "It's very encouraging to see that there's been some recognition on the national level that there are gender-related health issues and there was a general lack of support which dealt with those issues," Strauss said. Strauss was also chosen to chair a NIH working group formed to design and set the research agenda for women's health. Strauss noted that the creation of research centers such as the one for women's health is "very much in vogue," and said he hopes that the center's "diverse gathering across many specialties in medicine" will facilitate the development of similiar research programs with overlapping interests.

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