JAMA Launches New Channel, JAMA + Women’s Health

JAMA has launched a women’s health channel called JAMA + Women’s Health, according to a recent JAMA news release. Although most JAMA Network journals have a women’s health tag option, JAMA + Women’s Health will feature the topic exclusively. Officially launched on Sept. 5, the goal of this multimedia channel is to facilitate visibility of women’s health content already published across the network. It will also feature original interviews with study authors, podcasts and articles explaining new approaches in the field.

Linda Brubaker, M.D., MS, a gynecology and reproductive services professor at the University of California, San Diego, and deputy editor at JAMA, serves as the editor-in-chief of JAMA + Women’s Health.

“Women's health goes well beyond the commonly recognized issues such as reproductive health, gynecologic and breast cancers, and menopause,” Brubaker said in a video interview. “My clinical training as an obstetrician-gynecologist with subspecialty training in urogynecology has given me a front-row position into women's health.”

The term “women’s health” gained popularity in the 1960s, during the Women’s Health Movement, which drew attention to inequalities in research and healthcare. Previously, medical research tended to view women’s health from a male lens, due to the disproportionate number of men enrolled in trials of all types.

In 1977, the FDA created a policy that banned women of a reproductive age from clinical phase 1 or phase 2 trials unless they had a life-threatening condition. This was partly a reaction to the thalidomide tragedy, a morning sickness pill that caused more than 10,000 birth defects and infant deaths in the early 1960s. The policy was revisited in 1986, and in 1993, Congress passed a law requiring clinical trials to include women. In 1994, the FDA's Office of Women's Health was established.

As recently as 2019, women only accounted for 41% of participants in clinical trials for cancer, cardiovascular disease and psychiatric disorders—three of the diseases that most affect women, according to a 2022 Harvard Medical School study of 1,433 trials including 302,664 participants. Specifically, women comprise 60% of patients in psychiatry, 51% of cancer patients and 49% of cardiovascular disease patients.

“For decades, clinicians have used the best available clinical evidence to provide care for their patients,” Brubaker said. “A lot of those studies used men as their participants, and they excluded women, or women were very poorly represented in those studies. This limits the generalizability of information from those trials. And now with rigorous studies that include women or focus exclusively on women, we have much better evidence.”

Brubaker is also the subject of the latest JAMA + AI podcast episode, which is also available on JAMA + Women’s Health. She discusses the role of AI in women’s diagnostic imaging with JAMA + AI Editor-in-Chief Roy Perlis, M.D., MSc, and Linda Moy, inaugural vice chair of AI for the NYU Department of Radiology and former editor of Radiology.

“This initiative is dedicated to advancing clinical care across the spectrum of women’s health,” Brubaker said during the podcast. “The growing number of rigorous studies that are being published in JAMA and in the JAMA Network provide a curated source of trusted clinical information. This growing collection of content is now available at JAMA + Women’s Health.”