Abstracts from the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health Eighth Annual Interdisciplinary Women's Health Research Symposium November 17, 2011: Eighth Annual NIH Interdisciplinary Women's Health Research Symposium November 17, 2011

In the year following the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the release of the new NIH Strategic Plan for Women's Health and Sex Differences Research, ORWH has begun working with a number of NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) to begin the process of implementing its vision, goals, and objectives. As a first step, ORWH used the reissuance of the requests for applications (RFAs) for two of its major programs as an opportunity to address the goals of the strategic plan. These RFAs represent the sixth round of funding for the Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health (BIRCWH) program and the third round for the Specialized Centers of Research (SCOR) on Sex Differences, which was recently renamed in light of the increased focus of the new strategic plan on sex differences research and the translation of sex-specific findings to clinical practice. Since its inception, ORWH has looked for innovative ways to encourage collaborative, interdisciplinary research to improve women's health and elucidate the differences and similarities between women and men in the presentation, treatment, and outcomes of disease. ORWH developed, implemented, and funded two innovative interdisciplinary career development and research programs—the BIRCWH program, launched in 1999, and the SCOR program, established in 2001. Through these programs, many interdisciplinary collaborations have been established that would not have been possible otherwise. The Interdisciplinary Women's Health Research Symposium, now in its eighth year, showcases the research findings of BIRCWH scholars, who are early stage, junior faculty; and SCOR principal investigators (PIs), who are senior investigators. The abstracts for this symposium, which are compiled and presented on the following pages, cover a broad spectrum of research areas relevant to women's health and sex and gender differences. BIRCWH, an innovative, institutional mentored career development program, was designed to increase the number of women's health researchers pursuing interdisciplinary research. BIRCWH is built on three pillars: career development, a supportive mentoring relationship, and interdisciplinary research. The program pairs junior faculty, who have recently completed clinical training or postdoctoral fellowships and who are beginning basic, clinical, or translational research related to women's health, with senior investigators in women's health. In July 2010, ORWH and cosponsors including the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), National Institute on Aging (NIA), National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), and the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS) funded 13 new and continuing BIRCWH programs. Currently, there are 29 active BIRCWH programs nationwide and as of July 2011, 451 scholars have participated in the program, 81 percent of whom are women. The majority of BIRCWH scholars has achieved continued career success in research positions and obtained independent funding from Federal and other sources, including academic, foundation, and industry grants. As of 2010, scholar success rates for NIH research grant applications (R, P, and U series) ranged from 31 to 40 percent, and scholars have been awarded over 475 NIH research grants. Awards from the NIH were primarily from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), NICHD, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), NIDA, and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). In addition, scholars have received Federal funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy. The SCOR program provides support for senior investigators who are looking at sex differences and major medical problems that affect women by integrating basic, clinical, and translational approaches to women's health. It is hoped that the requirement that the SCOR contain a basic and clinical component will lead to the transfer of findings to patients. Each SCOR is required to have a central theme related to the disease area to which at least three individual core projects relate and which serves as an integrating force. SCORs may be interdepartmental, intercollegiate, or interinstitutional. The currently funded SCORs are in the fifth year of their funding cycle and consist of 11 centers that continue to thrive and are conducting interdisciplinary research on sex and gender factors in depression, pain, substance abuse, osteoporosis, and urinary tract and reproductive health. ORWH is the major funder of the SCORs with additional funding and programmatic support provided by five NIH ICs (NIAMS, NICHD, NIDA, NIDDK and NIMH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Office of Women's Health. The SCOR represents an excellent model for stimulating interdisciplinary and translational research, with significant applications to gender-specific human health. In the past five years, SCOR investigators have published 490 articles in a variety of journals, most commonly the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Journal of Urology, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, PLoS ONE, Infection and Immunity, Gastroenterology, American Journal of Physiology, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, demonstrating the diversity of research areas that is being conducted in the centers. The Eighth Annual Interdisciplinary Women's Health Research Symposium will take place on November 17, 2011 on the NIH campus. The abstracts selected for oral or poster presentation represent the full spectrum of women's health research. The symposium will include, for example, cutting edge research on inherited genes that affect breast cancer susceptibility in Latinas; the role of pubertal hormones and their influence on cognition and stress reactivity in adulthood; sex differences in cocaine seeking behavior and risk of relapse; and the interplay of depressive symptoms and gender and how they affect the risk of cardiovascular disease in older adults. A poster session will promote networking and interactions among BIRCWH scholars and BIRCWH and SCOR PIs. ORWH recognizes that the study of women's health across the lifespan can be enhanced by an interdisciplinary approach to research that encourages team-based studies by bridging basic and clinical science and incorporating new models of collaboration, institutional support, and evaluation. The BIRCWH and SCOR programs are ORWH's signature initiatives dedicated to promoting interdisciplinary research and career development with the goal of reducing fragmentation in approaches to women's health and advancing research on the role of sex differences on health and disease. Goal 1 of the Strategic Plan is to “increase sex differences research in basic science studies” and it is hoped that the expansion of the SCOR program will help achieve this goal. Goal 6 of the Strategic Plan is to “employ innovative strategies to build a well-trained, diverse, and vigorous women's health research workforce.” An important part of this goal is to “lead the way in encouraging institutions to recognize mentoring as an essential component of building career success in their training programs.” A pillar of BIRCWH is effective mentoring—ensuring that mentors represent the diverse disciplines needed to carry out interdisciplinary projects and support the career development that will help BIRCWH scholars to bridge the transition to research independence. The past two decades have seen major progress in women's health research and the understanding of how sex and gender factors affect the health of women and men. The BIRCWH PIs and scholars and the SCOR investigators now constitute groups of interdisciplinary researchers across the country that serve as a platform to further advances in women's health and sex differences research that will help to fill the remaining gaps in our knowledge of major health problems and translate research advances into findings that can be applied in the clinical setting. BIRCWH PIs from multiple institutions across the United States have also formed a Writing Group and are beginning to publish about lessons learned from utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to women's health research and career development at their institutions. It is our hope that the presentations at the Interdisciplinary Women's Health Research Symposium, represented in these abstracts, will further emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to women's health research and the need to perform sex/gender analyses of scientific results. Three of the SCOR PIs made major contributions to the IOM workshop on Sex Difference and Implications for Translational Neuroscience Research, the summary of which was published in March 2011. It is encouraging to see the BIRCWH and SCOR programs serving as a model for scientific knowledge that is team-science oriented and takes variations due to sex into account as an integral part of the research enterprise.