Sunday, September 13, 2026 Evidence-led medical research news
The First Cohort
Medical research, with the receipts

womens-health

9 stories tagged "womens-health"

Investigations

97,000 Sibling Sets Later: Standard Air-Pollution Birth Studies Overshot One Risk and Buried Another

Comparing brothers and sisters born to the same mother stripped out many of the family-level confounders, and the scary preterm-birth links shrank while the growth-restriction link the conventional models kept underselling got stronger.

Autoimmune & Inflammation

Lupus Hits Nine Women for Every Man, and the Reason May Be Hiding in DNA Both Sexes Share

Scientists sequenced more than 1.25 million immune cells and found over 1,000 genetic switches set differently in men and women, with the female side tuned for stronger inflammation. It may help explain why lupus hits nine women for every man.

Investigations

Canada Went Looking for the Forever Chemicals Nobody Tracks and Found a Dozen of Them in Women's Blood

Scientists went hunting for the replacement and precursor PFAS almost nobody measures. In Canadian women's blood they found a dozen of them, riding alongside the 'banned' legacy chemicals that still turn up in nearly everyone.

Brain & Aging

For Twenty Years, Women Were Warned That Estrogen Raised Their Dementia Risk. Stanford's Autopsies Point the Other Way.

A randomized federal trial spent two decades warning that hormone therapy raised older women's dementia risk. A Stanford autopsy study just found the opposite association. The catch: both studied women who started the drug far too late to settle it.

Autoimmune & Inflammation

A Map of 1.1 Million Lung Immune Cells Finds the Genetic Risk for Autoimmune Disease in Tissue, Not Blood

Researchers at La Jolla mapped genetic activity in 1.1 million lung immune cells and found about 1,000 genes whose activity is tuned by disease-risk variants only inside tissue, plus 1,700 that read differently in women than in men.

Brain & Aging

Same Diet, Same 15 Pounds: Only the Women Who Ate in an 8-Hour Window Got Sharper

Two groups of older women cut the same calories and lost the same 15 pounds over six months. The ones who packed eating into an 8-hour window still scored better on problem-solving, from a 47-person pilot that hasn't been peer-reviewed.

Metabolic & Weight

The GLP-1s That Barely Move the Scale Don't Cause Hair Loss, and That's the Clue Everyone Missed

Women on semaglutide shed hair at about twice the rate of men, and the weakest GLP-1s show almost no signal, which points the cause away from the follicle and straight at how fast the weight comes off.

Brain & Aging

Your First Pregnancy Rewires the Brain for One Baby. Your Second Rewires It for the Chaos of Two.

Amsterdam researchers scanned 110 women and found each pregnancy leaves its own mark, and the brain changes tied to maternal depression showed up months earlier the second time around.

Cancer

Pregnancy Stations Killer T Cells in the Milk Ducts, and a Decade Later They Haven't Left

Melbourne researchers found that pregnancy stations killer T cells in the milk ducts, where they persist for at least a decade and track with better breast cancer outcomes. Now the race is on to summon them with a hormone shot instead of a pregnancy.