Health Department Reverses Planned Cuts to Large Study on Women’s Health

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The Women’s Health Initiative has been tracking tens of thousands of women for decades.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on April 24 it is reversing planned cuts for the Women’s Health Initiative, a large study on women’s health.

“These studies represent critical contributions to our better understanding of women’s health,” a spokesperson for HHS told news outlets in a statement.

“While NIH initially exceeded its internal targets for contract reductions, we are now working to fully restore funding to these essential research efforts. NIH remains deeply committed to advancing public health through rigorous gold standard research and we are taking immediate steps to ensure the continuity of these studies,” the spokesperson added.

Funded by taxpayer money through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Women’s Health Initiative started studying more than 100,000 women in the early 1990s. The first study ended in 2005. A second study that enrolled 93,500 women began in 2010, and researchers still follow up on an annual basis with more than 42,000 participants.

The initiative regularly leads to publications on women’s health, such as a 2024 paper that concluded there was no evidence to recommend older women take calcium and vitamin D supplementation for the prevention of fractures.
Researchers conducting the research announced on April 21 that HHS had informed them that contracts would be terminated at the end of fiscal year 2025, which concludes on Sept. 30. The initiative is receiving at least $9.2 million in fiscal year 2025.

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Funding for the initiative’s coordinating center was not cut. The center is funded through January 2026, the researchers said.

“The full implications of these funding cuts are still being determined, but these contract terminations will significantly impact ongoing research and data collection,” the researchers said, adding that “The loss of this critical data stream would severely limit WHI’s ability to generate new insights into the health of older women, one of the fastest-growing segments of our population.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, was among the critics of the planned cuts.

Murray said in an April 23 statement that the planned cuts represented “a devastating loss for women’s health research.”

She added later, “Destroying the Women’s Health Initiative is an unbelievably shortsighted move that will have an immense long-term cost for our country—in undiscovered treatments and cures, the loss of vast amounts of data to improve women’s health, and a less healthy population overall.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote on the social media platform X that “we are not terminating this study.”

He also said: “NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has himself used this study in his own research. We all recognize that this project is mission critical for women’s health.”

Original News Source Link – Epoch Times

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