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The Faces of America
"They've got some nerve," Dolores Buckley of Worcester, Massachusetts, recalls thinking more than 15 years ago when she read about a study of breast cancer conducted solely on men. "When I saw a notice about a study only for women, I thought, That's for me."She jumped at the chance to join more than 161,000 volunteers in the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), one of the largest-ever clinical studies of women's health. Buckley, 76, a social worker who's earned a master's degree in English since retiring, was one of the WHI's first volunteers. "I never missed a single meeting. I wanted to do everything I could."
The 15-year investigation of the major killers and cripplers of women "has changed the course of women's health," says Elizabeth Nabel, MD, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded the groundbreaking research. It is best known for its blockbuster findings on hormone therapy. "It was the shock heard round the world," says Marcia Stefanick, PhD, head of the WHI's steering committee. "Hormones had been viewed as the fountain of youth, and our findings were very different from what everyone had been led to believe."
Lifestyle changes, the various WHI studies have shown, are the key to staying healthy as women age (see box, opposite, with the WHI's latest recommendations). Exercise, reports JoAnn Manson, MD, principal investigator at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, lowers the risk of heart disease, diabetes and osteoporosis.
Walking proved just as effective as more vigorous workouts. Now WHI is releasing the initial results of its clinical trials of a low-fat, high-fiber diet, and of calcium and vitamin D supplements. And dozens of other studies, including a five-year follow-up and analysis of DNA and blood samples from the volunteers, are underway.
"The WHI is proving to be far, far more valuable than we even anticipated," says Vivian Pinn, MD, director of the Office of Research on Women's Health, who describes its "real heroines" as the volunteers, the most diverse group of women ever studied.
"The faces of the WHI are the faces of America. They are your neighbors, your mothers, your teachers, your grocery clerks. We all owe a debt to them for their courage and commitment."
The WHI offered women ages 50 to 79 a unique opportunity. "If women didn't want to keep getting the same treatments as men, they had to step up and volunteer," says Timothy Johnson, MD, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan. His mother joined the study.
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