Women’s Health and Diabetes

Women’s health is often associated with medical conditions or situations that are seen only in women. But when it comes to diseases like diabetes, we rarely think about how gender plays a role. Women’s health in fact encompasses medical conditions and situations that are exclusive to women, such as certain fertility issues, gynecological cancers (e.g., ovarian, cervical), and menopausal symptoms; diseases that affect women more than men, including breast cancer and autoimmune disorders; and conditions where symptoms differ between sexes, potentially leading to misdiagnosis in women due to historical biases in medical research and marketing, as seen in cases like heart disease.

On March 27th, The Life Science Bridge, a collaborative initiative between the Swedish-American Chambers of Commerce in San Diego, Silicon Valley, New England, and Minnesota, hosted an event on Women’s Health, bringing together experts to discuss critical issues such as the hormonal impact notably on Type 1 Diabetes. Someone who knows a lot about this is Ginger Vieira, author and speaker as well as a patient living with Type 1 Diabetes.

“I’ve lived with Type 1 Diabetes for 25 years, and the challenges women face with this condition are uniquely intense! In a non-diabetic body, the pancreas is constantly adjusting how much insulin it produces in response to food, activity, stress, and hormones. In the female body, our constantly shifting hormones levels within our menstrual cycle add an entire other layer of challenge. It’s a moving target,” she said.

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A bridge to the US market

The Life Science Bridge is a joint initiative between the regional Swedish American Chambers of Commerce in San Diego, Boston, San Francisco and Minnesota, supporting Scandinavian life science companies looking to expand to the US market.

I asked her: As a patient, do you experience that you and other women living with this condition is met by healthcare providers with an understanding of how Type 1 Diabetes manifests differently in women?

“Definitely not. In fact, I’ve heard many women tell me they’ve asked their healthcare team for help and were told, ‘No, your menstrual cycle shouldn’t affect your blood sugars.’ When perimenopause strikes, the challenges simply shift as hormone levels shift. Oh, and we haven’t even started talking about the hugely intense challenges of pregnancy!” said Ginger.

Women’s health being in the spotlight now for many reasons, it’s funding being debated against a backdrop somehow implying it’s a “women’s only” concern, I wanted to hear from the clinical and academic experts in the field, what do we gain, both men and women, by adopting a sex and gender-specific lens when researching diabetes? 

Emily Sims, an MD and associate professor of pediatrics, answered this question as I listened in to the California event bringing together experts on both sides of the Atlantic. 

“Frequently, differences in physiology between men and women can tell us important information about factors that affect disease pathology and could even be used to develop new disease treatments. For example, in Type 1 Diabetes, unlike other autoimmune diseases, women are not predisposed, and after puberty, appear to be at lower risk than men. This could mean that female hormones have an impact on the disease that is important to understand and could lead to new therapies,” said Emily.

This line of reasoning was echoed by Karin Rosén, MD, PhD and Board Member of the Swedish company Diamyd Medical, a Swedish company developing precision medicine therapies for the prevention and treatment of autoimmune diabetes. Like Ginger and Emily, she was a speaker at the event and she concluded that there is a huge unmet medical need to develop novel effective treatments for Type 1 Diabetes, since patients with diabetes have a markedly increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarcts, stroke etc., and which is the leading cause of death, especially for women worldwide. 

“Women are not small men, so we need to ensure that women are included in clinical trials and we need to improve gender based data collection methodologies to increase the understanding of potential sex-based differences that impact women’s health,” Karin stated, before we dove into how a precision medicine approach can play a part in fighting such a broad disease as diabetes.

“Precision medicine enables early diagnosis, optimization of treatment to individual’s genetic and molecular make-up and prevention of severe complications of diabetes, such as kidney damage, blindness, and heart disease,” Karin added. 

Listening to Emily Sims, it’s clear that understanding the individual variations in how this disease plays out is key to an effective treatment.  

“We know that diabetes can present in many different ways and that some people’s diabetes can be more severe than others. Precision approaches could improve counseling on what to expect in term of how your diabetes will change over time and could be very valuable to guide patient decisions about lifestyle and approaches to therapy. Further, targeted approaches to treatments could allow for more effective treatment and better outcomes for each individual’s diabetes,” said Emily. 

As I explored how Emily, as a medical doctor, navigates individual variations of Type 1 Diabetes, we also examined its broader impact on patients’ families, for whom managing the disease is a full-time commitment. 

“A lot of people think that we have treatment of Type 1 Diabetes covered because you can give back people the insulin that their bodies are no longer making. However, even with the newest insulin formulations and the incredible technology we have available to improve quality of life and patient burden for persons living with Type 1 Diabetes, having this disease is really still a full-time job requiring constant consideration of all food intake, activity, blood sugar data, and decisions about insulin dosing,” Emily stated. “Even those who are completing all of the pieces their care provider asks for in their diabetes care are at risk for dangerous low blood sugars and long-term complications. This causes considerable anxiety and personal burden for patients and their families. We need better options for treatment for these individuals.”

Last but not least, I turned to the business side of addressing Type 1 Diabetes. Karin Rosén commented in her capacity of board member at Diamyd Medical:

“Market research including initial interviews with US health care practitioners as well as US payers demonstrated a strong willingness to consider prescribing the investigational precision medicine Diamyd for Type 1 (autoimmune) Diabetes and with an addressable patient population of over 60,000 patients for its launch indication, annual peak sales projections exceeds blockbuster potential*,” she said.

“Actions are needed to close the women’s health gap and apart from improving women’s health, boosting data availability, care delivery and treatments in to major women’s health conditions, could also create nearly USD 400 billion in annual economic improvement by 2040**,” Karin concluded. 

* Defined as annual sales of at least USD 1 billion. 
** World Economic Forum & McKinsey, January 2025.