Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Growing up female
- 2 Reproduction and its psychopathology
- 3 Women's sexual function and dysfunction
- 4 Gender differences in brain morphology and in psychiatric disorders
- 5 Thyroid hormones in major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder
- 6 The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical system
- 7 The cost of starvation: Eating disorders
- 8 Coronary artery disease and women: Estrogens and psychosocial and lifestyle risk factors
- 9 The psychophysiology of breast cancer: Disease, hormones, immunity, and stress
- 10 The psychopharmacology of women
- 11 Intervention trials concerned with disease prevention in women
- References
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Growing up female
- 2 Reproduction and its psychopathology
- 3 Women's sexual function and dysfunction
- 4 Gender differences in brain morphology and in psychiatric disorders
- 5 Thyroid hormones in major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder
- 6 The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical system
- 7 The cost of starvation: Eating disorders
- 8 Coronary artery disease and women: Estrogens and psychosocial and lifestyle risk factors
- 9 The psychophysiology of breast cancer: Disease, hormones, immunity, and stress
- 10 The psychopharmacology of women
- 11 Intervention trials concerned with disease prevention in women
- References
- Index
Summary
The term “women's health” is now commonly used to describe all the efforts under way to improve women's soundness of mind and body. Self-evidently, women experience health problems that differ from those of men – an old idea alive in classical times when Hygeia, the daughter of Asklepios, the god of medicine and healing, was venerated as the goddess of health. To return to the present, the workplace is increasingly the defining element in the lives of women, as it has always been for men, yet the care of the family and the task of raising children – often as a single parent – remain the woman's domain, a dual role that may have unknown long-term health consequences.
Fortunately, and this allows us to take a fresh look at women's health, or rather at those conditions that interfere with it, women's health has become a scientific discipline. The research literature, and in particular studies on hormones, reveal ever more complex findings which show that biologic factors are interwoven with and altered by human behavior, environmental influences, and social forces. There is, we think, an urgent need to draw on the results of new research to protect the health of women.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women's HealthHormones, Emotions and Behavior, pp. xiii - xivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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