Women Live Longer So Why Are They Sicker As They Age ?

time.com · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Health Longevity Women Live Longer—So Why Are They Sicker As They Age? 11:31 AM ET Courtesy of Sarah Deragon Jennifer Garrison Women's health researcher Jennifer Garrison on the key role that ovaries appear to play in female health and aging. Women live longer than men on average, but are more likely to develop chronic diseases and disability as they age. Unraveling that paradox is at the heart of neuroscientist Jennifer Garrison’s work—and what led her from studying the brain and aging to an unexpected area of research: The ovaries and the key role they appear to play in female health. The ovaries are the “architects of health in female bodies and the pacemaker for aging,” says Garrison, a neuroscientist and former executive director of the Productive Health Global Consortium, an organization that funded ovarian health research. In the female body, the ovaries are akin to “conductors in an orchestra,” Garrison says. They communicate with almost every tissue in the body and are intricately involved in the regulation of key biological processes, including immune function, metabolism and heart health, she says. Garrison, who was formerly also an assistant professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, left her decade-long career in academia last year to work on a project that has yet to be made public that she says is aimed at accelerating solutions related to women’s health. “Over the last couple of years, I had really become frustrated with how difficult it is to do translation, particularly in women’s health. and I wanted to try to build something that might solve some of these problems,” she says. As part of TIME’s series interviewing longevity leaders and influencers, we spoke to Garrison about what some of these problems are, her trajectory from brain researcher to women’s health expert, and what we understand (and still don’t) about the ovaries. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Would you consider yourself a “longevity” scientist? “Longevity” to me is a loaded word. It now means different things to different people, and I feel like it’s been somewhat co-opted by what I would call the “fringe” element of the space. For some people, it means removing limits on human lifespan; for some, it means extending the healthy years of life or “health span,” which is what I’m interested in; and for others, it means something in between. When I talk about this topic now, I usually use the term health span or “healthy longevity” to differentiate it from the question of lifespan extension, which is its own thing. You are a neuroscientist by training. Tell me about your research trajectory. When I started my research lab 11 years ago, I was heavily focused on the brain. The central thesis that my work was built around is the idea that your brain is like the master controller for all of your physiology. I was particularly interested in the brain’s “wi-fi” system. Your brain can communicate with distant tissues … through long-range signaling using lots of different classes of signaling molecules, including molecules that I became really obsessed with known as neuropeptides. It’s a two-way chemical conversation that’s happening between your brain and most of the organs in your body. The part of the brain that controls a lot of the set points in your physiology, called the hypothalamus, really makes rich use of this wi-fi signaling. [Editor’s note: In biology, a set point is the optimal value or range of a physiological variable—a body temperature of around 98.6°F, for example—that is maintained through a process known as homeostasis.] The hypothalamus regulates … things like energy and fluid balance, circadian rhythms, body temperature regulation, and reproductive function. These are things that help keep you alive. At the time, I thought aging was a really interesting area of biology and it was quite understudied. I was interested in understanding what might be driving systemic aging—and not just figuring out how to fix things after the damage is done. What are the first things that happen? What’s causing it? There had been some work done by other really amazing scientists to show that inflammatory signals go up with age everywhere in your body—known as “inflammaging.” But in the brain, that increase in inflammation with age is not uniform. It happens in particular hot spots in your brain and one of those hot spots is the hypothalamus. The basis for my research was simply to ask whether age-related increases in inflammation in the hypothalamus might disrupt some of the wi-fi signaling that is important for those homeostatic systems, and whether that might be one of the first dominoes to fall with respect to systemic aging. What did your lab uncover, and how did you go from studying the brain to women’s health? We discovered some really interesting and novel roles for oxytocin and vasopressin, two neuropeptides, in aging. In one project, we found that they play a really important role in fluid homeostasis; in another, that they play a role in ovulation. It was that area of inquiry that led me eventually to women’s health because we had discovered that a homologue of oxytocin and vasopressin does play a role in aging, and we were trying to hunt down the mechanism. [Editor’s note: Garrison and her colleagues studied a gene that is homologous—meaning it’s in genetic structure similar due to shared ancestry—to oxytocin and vasopressin in a type of roundworm.] How is it working? What’s it doing? And that led us to the reproductive system. So it was truly the result of following the science. Until then, I had never really thought about my reproductive organs outside of getting pregnant or not getting pregnant, my menstrual cycle, and the most superficial things about my menstrual cycle, and really nothing else. I had never thought for two seconds about how these organs were functioning in my body or what they were doing. But what became obvious to me once I started thinking about them was that ovaries, much like the brain, sit at the center of a really complex wi-fi signaling network. They are also talking to almost every tissue in the female body. Initially our work was really focused on brain-ovary signaling, but it became clear that what happens at and after menopause is that when ovaries stop functioning the way that they were before in midlife, it’s kind of like losing wi-fi signal to half your devices. The messages get scrambled and this impacts almost everything because your ovaries talk to most of your tissues. What became very clear to me is that at every age the ovaries are doing something to promote health. What are some examples of that? We hyperfocus on fertility and menopause and those are certainly two very important features and downstream consequences of ovarian aging, but really, your ovaries are important for you and for your health at any age. One in three women have some sort of health issue related to ovarian dysfunction. If you’re 10 and you’re female, your ovaries are going to dictate whether or not you go through puberty. If they’re not working properly, maybe you won’t go through puberty or other health risks might be uncovered. In your 20s and 30s, issues with fertility might be a downstream consequence of ovarian dysfunction. I started thinking about ovaries less from the reproductive angle, and more as the architects of health in female bodies and the pacemaker for aging because the other piece of this is that functionally ovaries are aging a lot faster than other tissues in your body, and that’s what sets up the disparity in health span between women and men. Women live longer than men on average, but they have shorter health spans at baseline. That differential is both horrifying and also I think a rich area for discovery. When I realized that there was this disparity, that’s when I was like, O.K., I’m going to pivot my work as much as I can towards understanding ovarian function. Do we have a sense yet of why women tend to be sicker than men as they age? The whole reason that we are trying to build this field is because we really don’t know. What we do know is what happens when you take ovaries away or when their function changes. Ovaries are like conductors in an orchestra. They’re coordinating things like bone health, heart health, and metabolism. Consider a disease that is caused by ovarian dysfunction, something like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), for example. We know that PCOS is intricately linked to metabolism. Women who have PCOS are more likely to have metabolic disease later in life, and that increased risk to metabolic disease is heritable—meaning that it’s passed on to their offspring, both male and female offspring. So there’s a strong link there between PCOS and metabolism, but we don’t fully understand that relationship. Similarly, we know that female immune function is intricately linked to ovarian function, but again there’s a lot of correlative data but we don’t understand those relationships. Why is it that autoimmune disease patients are 80% female? There’s clearly something sex-linked there. Why is it that at and after menopause your risk of cardiovascular disease skyrockets? This happened to me. During perimenopause, my cholesterol went through the roof. Some women have a disorder called primary ovarian insufficiency or primary ovarian failure, which means their ovaries partly or fully stop working for reasons that we don’t understand. We’re talking about women who are in their 20s and 30s. They go into menopause overnight. If you remove ovaries, it doesn’t matter how old you are, you go into menopause overnight—you start to experience all of the increased risks for cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, cognitive decline, autoimmune disorders. It’s fascinating to me that the medical community treats that as a medical emergency, and they do all kinds of interventions to try to mitigate those health risks. Can you imagine being 25 and having os