HHS reverses course and restores funding for Women’s Health Initiative : Shots

The Trump administration is restoring financial support for a landmark study of women’s health, an official said Thursday, reversing a defunding decision that shocked medical researchers.

“These studies represent critical contributions to our better understanding of women’s health,” said a statement from Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

The decision was made because the National Institutes of Health, which funds the Women’s Health Initiative, or WHI, has “initially exceeded its internal targets for contract reductions,” Nixon said. “We are now working to fully restore funding to these essential research efforts.”

The Trump administration has demanded that all federal health agencies cut their spending on contracts by at least 35%, undergo massive layoffs and terminate hundreds of research grants.

“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,” Nixon added.

The news came a day after NPR reported on the plan to cut the project’s funding.

Relief over renewed support

The turnabout was a relief for scientists in the field, though they were still awaiting official confirmation that the defunding had been reversed.

“We are thrilled to learn about this news,” Jean Wactawski-Wende, who leads one of four of the project’s regional centers that were slated to lose their funding, wrote Thursday in an email after learning about the turnaround from NPR.

“The WHI is a once in a lifetime study that has enormous opportunity to further advance our understanding of aging women’s health,” wrote Wactawski-Wende, who works at the University at Buffalo. “It will inform us on the factors associated with cardiovascular diseases, aging, cognition, frailty, resilience and much, much more.”

“If confirmed, this would be absolutely wonderful news,” said Dr. JoAnn Manson, of the Harvard Medical School, a longtime WHI researcher. “This groundbreaking study has so much more to offer to advance women’s health and the health of all older adults. It’s exciting that the study’s lifesaving discoveries can continue.”

“We would be thrilled if the news were true so that the groundbreaking research on women’s health can continue,” said Marian Neuhouser from the Fred Hutch Cancer Center, who chairs the initiative’s steering committee.

The long-running study continues to follow 40,000 women

HHS had said it would terminate contracts in September with all four regional centers in California, New York, Ohio and North Carolina. The centers are still following more than 40,000 women, who have been participating in the project for decades.

While the project’s coordinating center at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle would have continued to receive funding through January, its fate after that remained unclear. The termination of the contracts for the regional centers would have shut down the collection of any new data, preventing the project from building on decades of work by continuing to follow the volunteers.

Researchers said the initial defunding decision was surprising given that the new administration has made fighting chronic diseases a top priority. The initiative is uniquely positioned to produce important new insights into many chronic diseases, including Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

The NIH launched the initiative in the 1990s because most medical research had been conducted on men. The lack of women in studies raised questions about whether their findings applied to women, and it left health questions unique to women unanswered.

Over the years, scientists at more than 40 research centers around the country have collected detailed information about more than 160,000 women, including data about their diets, exercise, medications and illnesses.

The project has produced a series of important discoveries. Probably the most well known was the recognition that taking hormones starting in menopause does not protect a woman’s heart, which had been the medical dogma for years. Later findings supported the use of hormones to ease symptoms of menopause.