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

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 was reversing planned cuts in the Women’s Health Initiative, a large-scale study on women’s health.

“These studies represent important contributions to our better understanding of women’s health,” a spokesman for the HHS told the press in a statement.

“NIH initially exceeded its internal targets to reduce contracts, but is now working to fully restore funding for these important research efforts. NIH is deeply committed to public health advances through rigorous gold standard research and is taking immediate steps to ensure the continuity of these research.”

The Women’s Health Initiative, funded by taxpayer money through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), began studying more than 100,000 women in the early 1990s. The first study was completed in 2005. The second study, which enrolled 93,500 women, began in 2010, with researchers following up each year with over 42,000 participants.

The initiative regularly connects to women’s health publications, such as a 2024 paper that concluded that there was no evidence to recommend that older women adopt calcium and vitamin D supplements to prevent fractures.

The researchers who conducted the study announced on April 21 that HHS had notified them that the contract would end at the end of fiscal year 2025. This ends on September 30th.

Funding for the initiative’s coordination centre was not cut. The center is funded until January 2026, researchers said.

“The full implications of these funding cuts are still being determined, but the termination of these contracts will have a major impact on ongoing research and data collection,” the researcher said, adding that “this important data stream loss will severely limit our 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 will be joining the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was one of the critics of the planned cuts.

In a statement on April 23, Murray said the planned cuts represented “a catastrophic loss in women’s health research.”

She later added: “Destroying women’s health initiatives is an incredibly myopia movement, and we will acquire enormous long-term costs for our country. We will lose undiscovered treatments and treatments, the huge loss of data to improve women’s health, and the overall decline in healthy population.” ”

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

He also said, “NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya uses this study in his own research. We all recognize that this project is important for women’s health.”