Why the Five and One?
Health care doesn't fail women because we lack information. It fails because systems are slow to change, and they're rarely built around women's bodies, lives, or timelines. The Five & One exists to make those systems visible.
Every other week, we share five signals shaping women's health, plus one thing just for you.
This week
This week, we're looking at what it takes to support a woman's health across a whole lifetime. What we're still learning about hormone therapy and dementia. The everyday habits that beat the latest longevity hack. A new way to treat hard-to-treat gynecologic cancers. Why a diabetes diagnosis can play out differently for women. And how far some families will travel to afford IVF.
Free, forever. If you want more than the newsletter, there's an invitation at the bottom.
01. The HRT Story Isn't Finished Yet
A large new study found a link between hormone therapy and lower dementia risk in some groups of women. That is not evidence women should take HRT to prevent dementia. It is another reason to keep asking better questions about menopause, hormones, and how women's brains age.
The Breakdown
Dementia affects women more than men, and we still don't fully understand what role menopause and falling estrogen play in how the brain ages.
Earlier research raised concerns that hormone therapy might increase dementia risk, and that shaped how doctors and women have thought about HRT ever since.
HRT isn't one treatment, and women aren't one group. Timing, dose, formulation, age at start, type of menopause, and genetics may all change the answer. That's part of why studies can look like they disagree: they aren't studying the same women or the same treatments.
There still isn't enough evidence to use HRT for dementia prevention. A major 2025 review found no overall rise or drop in risk and called for better research on timing, formulation, dose, and route.
The Breakthrough
The useful question isn't "is HRT good or bad." It's which therapy, for which woman, at which time. Results in the new study differed depending on a woman's circumstances, with the largest apparent benefit among women who went through surgical menopause. Other research is looking at whether particular forms of hormone therapy relate differently to Alzheimer's changes in the brain. The science is getting more specific, which is exactly what women have been asking for.
Source: Women’s Health Magazine
02. The Longevity Basics Still Matter
The habits with the best evidence behind them are the ones you already know. The wellness world is full of biohacks promising a longer life. A new healthy aging survey brings the conversation back to something far less exotic: movement, food, sleep, connection, and preventive care. For women, the work is knowing how those basics need to shift as our bodies change.
The Breakdown
The longevity industry makes healthy aging feel complicated and expensive. What actually drives long-term health is much less glamorous, and it takes years of consistency, not the newest intervention.
Menopause changes the picture. It shifts heart, metabolic, and bone risk, and losing muscle and bone with age makes strength training more important, not less.
Healthy aging isn't only up to you. Time, income, caregiving, food access, safe places to exercise, and preventive care all shape whether those "simple" habits are even possible.
The Breakthrough
You don't have to become a biohacker. The basics remain remarkably powerful tools, and what's improving is the guidance around them. Advice for women is getting more specific on strength, bone health, heart risk, and menopause. And unlike most longevity trends, these are habits you can start, stop, and start again at almost any age.
Source: U.S. News
03. A New Way to Attack Hard-to-Treat Cancers
Immunotherapy has changed treatment for several cancers, but its role in gynecologic cancers is still being worked out. New research suggests one type may give some women with advanced or returning endometrial and cervical cancer another option. That matters, because endometrial cancer is becoming more common.
The Breakdown
Gynecologic cancers aren't one disease. Tumors differ from patient to patient, so a treatment that works well for one woman may do little for another.
Endometrial cancer rates are rising, with especially concerning differences in outcomes for Black women.
Options narrow when cancer is advanced, returns, or stops responding to surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
These cancers have long received less research money and attention than the harm they cause would justify.
The Breakthrough
Researchers are testing TIL therapy, which turns a patient's own immune cells into the treatment. Doctors take immune cells that already recognize her tumor, grow many more of them outside the body, then return them in much larger numbers. Early findings suggest it may help in some advanced gynecologic cancers, including tumors that resisted earlier treatment. It's part of a bigger shift toward treating cancer based on the biology of the tumor and the patient, not just where the cancer started. Big questions remain about who benefits and for how long. But for women who have run out of options, one more way to attack a tumor matters enormously.
Source: News Medical
04. Same Diagnosis. Different Paths.
A type 2 diabetes diagnosis carries well-known risks, and new research suggests those risks unfold differently for women and men. In a study following nearly 29,000 people with type 2 diabetes, women were more likely to later be diagnosed with a mental health condition. Men were more likely to develop heart or advanced kidney disease.
The Breakdown
Diabetes care has focused mostly on blood sugar and physical complications like heart and kidney disease, even though mental and physical health influence each other.
8.1% of women developed a recorded mental health condition after diagnosis, compared with 5.3% of men. The gap was widest among younger women, ages 16 to 39.
Researchers don't yet know why. Biology may play a role, but women also had far more primary care visits, which creates more chances for a condition to be noticed and recorded.
The Breakthrough
Research like this can move chronic disease care from treating a diagnosis to understanding the person living with it. Mental health screening could become a routine part of diabetes care instead of something that waits until symptoms get severe. Looking at results by sex and age also reveals patterns that disappear when everyone is analyzed together, and those patterns help clinicians anticipate risk and step in earlier. We don't know yet why women's paths differ. Recognizing that they do is an important place to start.
Source: Medical News Today
05. When Care Is Cheaper an Ocean Away
For a growing number of Americans, fertility treatment comes with an extra decision: whether to leave the country to afford it. More patients are traveling to countries like Greece and Spain for IVF, where treatment can cost a fraction of the US price. It's an extraordinary workaround, and it raises a bigger question about why fertility care is still out of reach for so many people at home.
The Breakdown
IVF is extremely expensive in the US, and insurance coverage varies widely. One recent analysis put the average cost of a single cycle above $29,000, and many patients need more than one.
Medication, genetic testing, and embryo storage push the real total much higher.
The emotional urgency of fertility treatment leaves patients vulnerable in a market where prices are high, complicated, and hard to compare.
Going abroad adds new challenges, including another country's rules, vetting clinics from far away, moving medical records, and managing follow-up care across borders.
The Breakthrough
Traveling is giving some patients access to treatment they simply could not afford here. In Greece, IVF using a patient's own eggs can run roughly $3,000 to $4,000 before medication, so even after travel costs, many people spend far less overall. All that travel is also creating an unusually clear comparison of what the same treatment costs in different health systems. Meanwhile, lower-cost clinics at home and expanding fertility benefits show that today's price isn't inevitable. Building a family shouldn't require becoming an expert in international health care, or having enough money and flexibility to cross an ocean.
Source: KFF Health News
Your+1: A Documentary That Slipped Past Us
No Country for Mothers slipped past our radar, maybe because it isn't billed as a women's health film. But it looks at how American workplaces fail mothers, and the burnout, impossible tradeoffs, and pressure that follow land squarely on women's health and wellbeing. It also takes on something we think about a lot at 51&: what happens when women are pitted against one another instead of recognizing the power we have together.
Here's an amazing fact. The film set a world record for the most producers ever credited on a single movie, with more than 2,500 mothers, caregivers, and advocates. That credit is the whole point. American motherhood is a public issue, not a private struggle.
There are screenings happening around the country. And here's the part that really caught our attention: you can request a screening for your own group. So take this as both a recommendation and an idea. Get some women together, watch, talk, and maybe leave thinking a little differently about what we could change collectively. Because connecting and leaning on each other around hard things is health care too.
Source: Moms First
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P.S. Somewhere out there, someone is spending seven figures a year to reverse their biological age with a hundred supplements, a red-light bed, and a full night hooked up to sensors. This week's healthy aging survey looked at all of it and concluded: sleep, vegetables, friends, and lifting something heavy. We regret to inform you the answer was free the entire time.