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No more ‘ bikini health ’
UniMelb research shifts views on women ' s ageing .
Cassandra Szoeke interviewed by Eleanor Campbell
It has been over 30 years since female hysteria was unlisted as an official diagnosis , and we have learned very little about women ’ s health since then , according to University of Melbourne researcher , neurologist and author Professor Cassandra Szoeke .
“ When people say ‘ women ’ s health ’ they all think about something that a bikini is covering ,” she said .
“ We know very , very little about women ’ s health not covering the bikini locations .”
In her new book Secrets of Women ’ s Healthy Ageing , Szoeke draws on the findings of the longest study into women ’ s health in Australia to uncover a holistic perspective on chronic disease prevention in later life .
Szoeke joined Campus Review to share the details of what makes you healthier as you age , gender bias in health research and the essential ingredients of living well .
CR : Can you tell us how the Women ’ s Healthy Ageing project has evolved over the years ? CS : The first people were assessed in 1991 , and it was focused on taking women who were premenopausal and then planning to look at them across the menopause .
It ’ s outstanding that people stayed in the study for a decade because you usually lose half your participants in three to five years . So for it to be going 10 years with 90 per cent retention was really incredible . And that ’ s when I joined . So I ’ ve been with the study for 20 years .
If you go back to the 1900s , the age of death was 50 . Now the main age of menopause is 50 . In 2021 we ’ re living a third of our lives in post-menopause .
How have perceptions of women ’ s health and ageing shifted over the past 20 years ? Some of the early work was around hysteria ; women were still being diagnosed with symptoms said to be hysteria , when in fact they were real diseases . In my book I cover the fact that whilst the diagnosis of hysteria has been officially removed , to this day , women present with heart attacks to emergency departments and they are turned away . So there are still some issues around women ’ s symptoms not being considered pathological .
The beginning of your book discusses the diverse experiences and conditions of the women in the study . What brought them together in terms of healthy ageing ? What were the common denominators ? It was remarkable how many of them were caring for others . It was remarkable how much responsibility they had for other people ’ s health . Across that , whether it be in earlier years for their children and in later years for relatives and for their partners , it was just remarkable how much they were doing for others .
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