A Framework for a Women's Health Research Agenda

ABSTRACT Background and Methods: Previous efforts aimed at setting priorities for research on women's health issues have focused on conditions and diseases unique to, or more prevalent in, women. As a result, the leading causes of mortality in women, such as ischemie heart disease and lung cancer, are not identified as priority health issues for women. In this paper, we present a new framework for developing a research agenda in women's health. The framework includes criteria for identifying priority health issues and an approach to formulating research questions. The new criteria ensure that health conditions are selected that reflect common causes of morbidity and mortality in women rather than restricting women's health research to reproductive issues or to conditions that disproportionately affect women. After identifying priority health issues, the next step is to formulate research questions. We recommend that research questions take into account not only traditional biologic approaches but also the...