Dr. Betty Murray explains why perimenopause remains understudied compared to menopause: biomedical research historically focused on men, and women's hormonal fluctuations make them harder to study. New funding exists, but researchers need to determine when hormone therapy should start, not just wait for menopause. Minerva is being built to identify the right timing.
decades, all the research was done on men, and then it was kind of assumed that women were the same, and it's just not. So having research on women, and I know it can be difficult because of hormones and pregnancy and perimenopause, like, I understand it, but there are other ways that we can also research and survey women. Like, for what I do is one way, right? Like, it doesn't always have to be a specific way that we can actually find out and learn more about women. So it's so nice to see more funding is becoming available, but we need way— first of all, way more research in perimenopause. As little as there is in menopause, there's way more than there is in perimenopause. So we just need so much more research available to us.
Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, it's— yes, I agree. And particularly perimenopause, because there's, you know, where do you start doing things? Is it, you know, you don't wait for obviously for the hormone crash and the loss of periods because at that point everything is accelerated. But then it's like, okay, we know we need to start hormones earlier, but how do you know? Right? Which is why we're building Minerva, quite literally.
