Working for women's health.

Women's health is an area that is gaining increasing attention with the realization that men's and women's bodies don't just look different-they also react differently to environmental agents. Barbara J. Davis, head of the Female Reproductive Pathology Group and now acting chief of the newly created Laboratory of Women's Health, is leading women's health studies at the NIEHS. Over the course of her 10 years at the institute, Davis has concentrated her efforts on studying ovarian toxicity and its relationship to the environment. The ramifications of infertility stretch further than just whether a woman can bear children. For instance, in addition to making a woman less likely to conceive, persistently lower estrogen concentrations have been shown to contribute to osteoporosisf and heart disease. Davis urges a broad pe spective in looking at women's health, perspective that takes into account not jut the primary effects but also the secondaijr and tertiary effects of a particular exposure. Davis's strategy has been to develop rodent models that mimic the human menstrual cycle so that she can study the effects of chemical exposures over several iterations of a hormonal cycle. Rather than inundate the model with a chemical that totally shuts down the reproductive system, she says, she leaves the reproductive system intact so as to study the long-term effects of certain exposures. Davis feels that the cyclical approach taken toward women's diseases could also be applied to male-specific hormone-related diseases such as prostate cancer. The Female Reproductive Pathology Group provides support for reproductive toxicity studies conducted by the National Toxicology Program. The group studies the pathophysiology of ovarian dysfunction and cancer in women and rodents caused by chemical exposures, and seeks to identify ovarian target cells as well as the biochemical and molecular mechanisms by which both synthetic and naturally occurring environmental chemicals cause ovarian dysfunction or cancer. Both in vivo and in vitro models are used in this work. The group is also working to determine the role of key genes and signaling molecules in ovarian cell growth, differentiation, and physiology, and to understand how to modify these pathways to prevent or lessen the chance of ovarian dysfunction and cancer. The Laboratory of Women's Health is expected to carry those studies a step furovaries to ovulate-without this cue, the ther, extending them into the realm of direction never comes and the rodents fail human exposure. to ovulate. Nevertheless, egg follicles are