Women's Heart Health and the Menopausal Transition: Two Faces of the Same Coin

The impact of the presence or absence of sex hormones on women's health is woefully underresearched. Fundamentally, women's bodies are now understood to spend considerable time under widely fluctu- ating hormonal influences, including puberty, pregnancy, peripartum, and menopause, and a woman's vessels are therefore preset for functional and physiological alterations based on levels of sex hormones. However, our understanding of the influences of sex hormones on the regulation of a multitude of biological and physiological processes has not translated into the development and/or collection or analyses of data on therapeutic treatments and/or outcomes in the context of women's disease management.