October 23, 2025
— 7 min read
October 23, 2025
— 7 min read
October 23, 2025
— 7 min read
Beyond Symptoms:
Elevating Women's Health
Through Proactive Longevity
Beyond Symptoms:
Elevating Women's Health Through Proactive Longevity
Beyond Symptoms:
Elevating Women's Health
Through Proactive Longevity
Women's health has been historically overlooked, leading to significant gaps, particularly in midlife. Biograph's integrated, data-driven approach across five key pillars offers a proactive solution for optimizing women's healthspan.
Women's health has been historically overlooked, leading to significant gaps, particularly in midlife. Biograph's integrated, data-driven approach across five key pillars offers a proactive solution for optimizing women's healthspan.
Women's health has been historically overlooked, leading to significant gaps, particularly in midlife. Biograph's integrated, data-driven approach across five key pillars offers a proactive solution for optimizing women's healthspan.
Yihan Chen
Clinic Physician
Yihan Chen
Clinic Physician
Yihan Chen
Clinic Physician
Gaps in the Women's Health Landscape
For too long, the medical landscape has been skewed. Clinical trials and medical research have predominantly featured male participants, meaning our understanding of disease and physiology is often male-centric. This exclusion has led to a deficit in knowledge regarding unique female health trajectories, resulting in guidelines and diagnostic criteria that frequently fail to capture the nuances of female biology.
The data is stark: while women statistically live longer than men, they also experience a greater proportion of their lives in suboptimal health. This is a phenomenon known as the morbidity-mortality paradox and is particularly evident in midlife, where hormonal shifts trigger widespread physiologic changes. These changes, including increased cardiovascular and metabolic risk, bone mass loss, and cognitive decline, are profound, yet frequently undertreated or misattributed to aging. Current market solutions often focus narrowly on symptom relief. While essential for quality of life, this approach misses the opportunity to address fundamental, long-term risks. Biograph’s model is comprehensive, integrating strategies for immediate symptom relief with an evidence-based plan to address the root causes of disease and optimize healthspan.
Early Milestones Inform Preventive Health Strategies
A woman’s health risks begin to accumulate long before perimenopause, building over the course of her entire lifetime. Hormonal patterns established early in life can significantly influence later-life cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurological health. For instance, the age of menarche and menstrual cycle regularity and length correlate with risks for cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, and even dementia decades later. These early milestones provide key information that should inform preventive health strategies throughout a woman’s life.
Conditions like Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) are too often only viewed from a reproductive perspective. PCOS is fundamentally a metabolic disorder that predisposes women to insulin resistance and cardiometabolic disease. Gestational history, including diabetes and hypertension during pregnancy, also significantly affects risk later in life. This life-course perspective highlights the necessity of healthcare models that track a woman’s health trajectory longitudinally, rather than focusing on episodic care. Biograph's model continuously tracks these trajectories, integrating historical data and early life factors into personalized, long-term prevention plans.
Five Pillars of Women's Longevity
Biograph’s approach is built on a holistic understanding of health, focusing on five interconnected pillars essential for long-term vitality, that take into account women's unique challenges and opportunities.
Cardiovascular Health
Heart disease remains the number one killer of women, a fact often overshadowed by its historical framing as a male condition. Women are also disproportionately affected by stroke, which presents at younger ages and often with worse outcomes. Women’s heart attack symptoms can present differently, and their risk escalates sharply post-menopause due to declining estrogen. Advanced diagnostics like ApoB, Lp(a), Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) scans, and Coronary CT Angiography (CTA) enable precise identification and proactive intervention against cardiovascular threats before they manifest as disease.
Neurologic Health
Women bear a disproportionate burden of dementia, and midlife hormonal fluctuations significantly impact cognition, mood, and sleep. These changes are physiologic responses that affect cognitive reserve. Brain health is supported through comprehensive assessments, including ApoE genotyping, brain MRIs, and neurocognitive assessments, which enable strategies that bolster cognitive resilience.
Metabolic Health
Metabolic shifts accompanying perimenopause, including changes in weight, fat distribution, and insulin sensitivity, signal increased risk for diabetes and cardiometabolic disease. Conditions like PCOS, which as mentioned above is intrinsically a metabolic disorder, highlight how women’s health issues have been narrowly framed, often focusing solely on fertility. Employing DEXA scans to assess body composition, advanced biomarkers to detect early insulin resistance, and whole-body MRI to identify reversible conditions like fatty liver disease allows for earlier and more effective intervention.
Cancer Prevention
Midlife marks a rise in the risk for various cancers, including breast, ovarian, uterine, and colon cancers. Standard-of-care screenings can be effective, but are limited to detecting only a few cancer types and screening adherence often wanes during these demanding years. A proactive strategy goes further by complementing routine screenings with advanced tests like multi-cancer early detection blood tests and whole-body MRI. This personalized approach to risk-stratification equips women with powerful tools for early detection, which in turn can improve treatment outcomes.
Quality of Life
Symptoms such as hot flashes, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and mood shifts can significantly diminish a woman's healthspan. Other metrics including signs of low bone mass and decreased strength can impact both healthspan and lifespan. All of these signals must be validated and integrated into a comprehensive health plan. By addressing their root causes alongside the other pillars, women are empowered to experience not just longevity, but a high quality of life.
Biograph's multidisciplinary team and advanced diagnostics allow for assessment and intervention across all five pillars, offering personalized strategies that extend beyond simple symptom management.
CASE STUDY
From Overwhelmed to Empowered: Navigating Midlife Health
A woman in her late 40s came to Biograph seeking to understand several health concerns that she attributed to general aging and perimenopause. She was particularly worried about her recent weight gain, increasing anxiety and fatigue, and persistent high blood pressure. To make matters worse, feeling "not like herself" had led to lifestyle choices that created a vicious cycle of further worsening symptoms and health metrics.
Biograph's comprehensive diagnostics revealed increased risk in several pillars of health, including Cardiovascular and Quality of Life: stage 2 range hypertension, low VO2 max, low mobility score, insomnia, and moderate-to-severe anxiety and depression, all of which were exacerbated by wide hormonal fluctuations during the menopause transition. After working closely with her to make sense of each assessment, she gained clarity on the interconnectedness of her mental health, lifestyle, and physical well-being.
She received actionable insights for mood management, targeted lifestyle interventions from a care team of physicians, dietitians and exercise physiologists, and personalized medication advice. Importantly, she left feeling heard and empowered to take agency over her health.
This case underscores the profound importance of a holistic assessment that connects seemingly unrelated symptoms to lifestyle factors and underlying physiology, many of which are unique to women.
The Biograph Paradigm Shift for Women's Health
Biograph fundamentally changes the standard of care for women by shifting from a reactive, symptom-focused model to one that is proactive, data-driven, and deeply personalized. Our approach moves beyond treating ailments as they arise to understanding the whole person and optimizing their health across their entire lifespan. This represents a significant paradigm shift:
From Reactive to Proactive
We move beyond waiting for symptoms, actively seeking to identify and mitigate risks before they become problems.
From Symptom-Only to Lifespan + Healthspan
Our focus is not just on extending lifespan, but on maximizing healthspan, ensuring vitality and well-being throughout life.
From Fragmented to Integrated Care
A multidisciplinary team collaborates to provide comprehensive care, connecting dots across different health domains.
From One-Size-Fits-All to Personalized Prevention
Tailored strategies are developed based on an individual's unique data, genetics, and lifestyle, including hormone testing and therapy as clinically indicated.
This personalized, evolving strategy is essential because the women's health care gap cannot be closed by treating symptoms alone. It requires addressing risk, resilience, and prevention opportunities across the entire arc of a woman’s life. Midlife health is a particularly powerful inflection point. By reframing perimenopause and menopause as opportunities for intervention, not decline, we can profoundly shift women’s long-term trajectories.
At Biograph, we are building a new model of care that elevates every pillar of health and empowers women to live not only longer lives, but healthier, more fulfilling ones.
Elevate Your Healthspan
Discover how Biograph's integrated, personalized approach can transform your approach to women's health.
Written by Yihan Chen
Clinic Physician
Dr. Chen is a Clinic Physician at Biograph NYC. She joined Biograph after building her expertise at the intersection of innovation and academia. Gaining frontline experience as a Primary Care Physician and Clinical Product Lead at a preventive healthcare startup (Forward), and further honed her skills as a Clinical Instructor at UCLA. Her foundation includes an MD from Tulane University School of Medicine and completing both residency and Chief Residency in Internal Medicine at UCLA.
References
Kulminski AM, Culminskaya IV, Ukraintseva SV, Arbeev KG, Land KC, Yashin AI. Sex-specific health deterioration and mortality: the morbidity-mortality paradox over age and time. Exp Gerontol. 2008 Dec;43(12):1052-7. doi: 10.1016/j.exger.2008.09.007. Epub 2008 Sep 20. PMID: 18835429; PMCID: PMC2703431. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2703431/
El Khoudary, S. R., et al. "Menopause Transition and Cardiovascular Disease Risk: Implications for Timing of Early Prevention: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association." Circulation, 2020, DOI: 10.1161/CIR.0000000000000912. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000912
Cao Q, Tan CC, Xu W, Hu H, Cao XP, Dong Q, Tan L, Yu JT. The Prevalence of Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. J Alzheimers Dis. 2020;73(3):1157-1166. doi: 10.3233/JAD-191092. PMID: 31884487. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31884487/
Gong J, Harris K, Lipnicki DM, Castro-Costa E, Lima-Costa MF, Diniz BS, Xiao S, Lipton RB, Katz MJ, Wang C, Preux PM, Guerchet M, Gbessemehlan A, Ritchie K, Ancelin ML, Skoog I, Najar J, Sterner TR, Scarmeas N, Yannakoulia M, Kosmidis MH, Guaita A, Rolandi E, Davin A, Gureje O, Trompet S, Gussekloo J, Riedel-Heller S, Pabst A, Röhr S, Shahar S, Singh DKA, Rivan NFM, Boxtel MV, Köhler S, Ganguli M, Chang CC, Jacobsen E, Haan M, Ding D, Zhao Q, Xiao Z, Narazaki K, Chen T, Chen S, Ng TP, Gwee X, Numbers K, Mather KA, Scazufca M, Lobo A, De-la-Cámara C, Lobo E, Sachdev PS, Brodaty H, Hackett ML, Peters SAE, Woodward M; Cohort Studies of Memory in an International Consortium (COSMIC). Sex differences in dementia risk and risk factors: Individual-participant data analysis using 21 cohorts across six continents from the COSMIC consortium. Alzheimers Dement. 2023 Aug;19(8):3365-3378. doi: 10.1002/alz.12962. Epub 2023 Feb 15. PMID: 36790027; PMCID: PMC10955774. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36790027/
Rossouw JE, Aragaki AK, Manson JE, et al. Menopausal Hormone Therapy and Cardiovascular Diseases in Women With Vasomotor Symptoms: A Secondary Analysis of the Women’s Health Initiative Randomized Clinical Trials. JAMA Intern Med. Published online September 15, 2025. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.4510 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2838720
Nerattini, M., Jett, S., Andy, C., Carlton, C., Zarate, C., Boneu, C., Battista, M., Pahlajani, S., Loeb-Zeitlin, S., Havryulik, Y., Williams, S., Christos, P., Fink, M., Brinton, R. D., & Mosconi, L. (2023). Systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of menopause hormone therapy on risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2023.1260427
Lily N Dastmalchi, Martha Gulati, Age at menarche and cardiovascular risk: a moving target of risk assessment in women, European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, Volume 32, Issue 10, August 2025, Pages 867–869, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurjpc/zwaf318
Wang Y, Stuart JJ, Rich-Edwards JW, et al. Menstrual Cycle Regularity and Length Across the Reproductive Lifespan and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease. JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(10):e2238513. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.38513 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2797622
Gaps in the Women's Health Landscape
For too long, the medical landscape has been skewed. Clinical trials and medical research have predominantly featured male participants, meaning our understanding of disease and physiology is often male-centric. This exclusion has led to a deficit in knowledge regarding unique female health trajectories, resulting in guidelines and diagnostic criteria that frequently fail to capture the nuances of female biology.
The data is stark: while women statistically live longer than men, they also experience a greater proportion of their lives in suboptimal health. This is a phenomenon known as the morbidity-mortality paradox and is particularly evident in midlife, where hormonal shifts trigger widespread physiologic changes. These changes, including increased cardiovascular and metabolic risk, bone mass loss, and cognitive decline, are profound, yet frequently undertreated or misattributed to aging. Current market solutions often focus narrowly on symptom relief. While essential for quality of life, this approach misses the opportunity to address fundamental, long-term risks. Biograph’s model is comprehensive, integrating strategies for immediate symptom relief with an evidence-based plan to address the root causes of disease and optimize healthspan.
Early Milestones Inform Preventive Health Strategies
A woman’s health risks begin to accumulate long before perimenopause, building over the course of her entire lifetime. Hormonal patterns established early in life can significantly influence later-life cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurological health. For instance, the age of menarche and menstrual cycle regularity and length correlate with risks for cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, and even dementia decades later. These early milestones provide key information that should inform preventive health strategies throughout a woman’s life.
Conditions like Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) are too often only viewed from a reproductive perspective. PCOS is fundamentally a metabolic disorder that predisposes women to insulin resistance and cardiometabolic disease. Gestational history, including diabetes and hypertension during pregnancy, also significantly affects risk later in life. This life-course perspective highlights the necessity of healthcare models that track a woman’s health trajectory longitudinally, rather than focusing on episodic care. Biograph's model continuously tracks these trajectories, integrating historical data and early life factors into personalized, long-term prevention plans.
Five Pillars of Women's Longevity
Biograph’s approach is built on a holistic understanding of health, focusing on five interconnected pillars essential for long-term vitality, that take into account women's unique challenges and opportunities.
Cardiovascular Health
Heart disease remains the number one killer of women, a fact often overshadowed by its historical framing as a male condition. Women are also disproportionately affected by stroke, which presents at younger ages and often with worse outcomes. Women’s heart attack symptoms can present differently, and their risk escalates sharply post-menopause due to declining estrogen. Advanced diagnostics like ApoB, Lp(a), Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) scans, and Coronary CT Angiography (CTA) enable precise identification and proactive intervention against cardiovascular threats before they manifest as disease.
Neurologic Health
Women bear a disproportionate burden of dementia, and midlife hormonal fluctuations significantly impact cognition, mood, and sleep. These changes are physiologic responses that affect cognitive reserve. Brain health is supported through comprehensive assessments, including ApoE genotyping, brain MRIs, and neurocognitive assessments, which enable strategies that bolster cognitive resilience.
Metabolic Health
Metabolic shifts accompanying perimenopause, including changes in weight, fat distribution, and insulin sensitivity, signal increased risk for diabetes and cardiometabolic disease. Conditions like PCOS, which as mentioned above is intrinsically a metabolic disorder, highlight how women’s health issues have been narrowly framed, often focusing solely on fertility. Employing DEXA scans to assess body composition, advanced biomarkers to detect early insulin resistance, and whole-body MRI to identify reversible conditions like fatty liver disease allows for earlier and more effective intervention.
Cancer Prevention
Midlife marks a rise in the risk for various cancers, including breast, ovarian, uterine, and colon cancers. Standard-of-care screenings can be effective, but are limited to detecting only a few cancer types and screening adherence often wanes during these demanding years. A proactive strategy goes further by complementing routine screenings with advanced tests like multi-cancer early detection blood tests and whole-body MRI. This personalized approach to risk-stratification equips women with powerful tools for early detection, which in turn can improve treatment outcomes.
Quality of Life
Symptoms such as hot flashes, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and mood shifts can significantly diminish a woman's healthspan. Other metrics including signs of low bone mass and decreased strength can impact both healthspan and lifespan. All of these signals must be validated and integrated into a comprehensive health plan. By addressing their root causes alongside the other pillars, women are empowered to experience not just longevity, but a high quality of life.
Biograph's multidisciplinary team and advanced diagnostics allow for assessment and intervention across all five pillars, offering personalized strategies that extend beyond simple symptom management.
CASE STUDY
From Overwhelmed to Empowered: Navigating Midlife Health
A woman in her late 40s came to Biograph seeking to understand several health concerns that she attributed to general aging and perimenopause. She was particularly worried about her recent weight gain, increasing anxiety and fatigue, and persistent high blood pressure. To make matters worse, feeling "not like herself" had led to lifestyle choices that created a vicious cycle of further worsening symptoms and health metrics.
Biograph's comprehensive diagnostics revealed increased risk in several pillars of health, including Cardiovascular and Quality of Life: stage 2 range hypertension, low VO2 max, low mobility score, insomnia, and moderate-to-severe anxiety and depression, all of which were exacerbated by wide hormonal fluctuations during the menopause transition. After working closely with her to make sense of each assessment, she gained clarity on the interconnectedness of her mental health, lifestyle, and physical well-being.
She received actionable insights for mood management, targeted lifestyle interventions from a care team of physicians, dietitians and exercise physiologists, and personalized medication advice. Importantly, she left feeling heard and empowered to take agency over her health.
This case underscores the profound importance of a holistic assessment that connects seemingly unrelated symptoms to lifestyle factors and underlying physiology, many of which are unique to women.
The Biograph Paradigm Shift for Women's Health
Biograph fundamentally changes the standard of care for women by shifting from a reactive, symptom-focused model to one that is proactive, data-driven, and deeply personalized. Our approach moves beyond treating ailments as they arise to understanding the whole person and optimizing their health across their entire lifespan. This represents a significant paradigm shift:
From Reactive to Proactive
We move beyond waiting for symptoms, actively seeking to identify and mitigate risks before they become problems.
From Symptom-Only to Lifespan + Healthspan
Our focus is not just on extending lifespan, but on maximizing healthspan, ensuring vitality and well-being throughout life.
From Fragmented to Integrated Care
A multidisciplinary team collaborates to provide comprehensive care, connecting dots across different health domains.
From One-Size-Fits-All to Personalized Prevention
Tailored strategies are developed based on an individual's unique data, genetics, and lifestyle, including hormone testing and therapy as clinically indicated.
This personalized, evolving strategy is essential because the women's health care gap cannot be closed by treating symptoms alone. It requires addressing risk, resilience, and prevention opportunities across the entire arc of a woman’s life. Midlife health is a particularly powerful inflection point. By reframing perimenopause and menopause as opportunities for intervention, not decline, we can profoundly shift women’s long-term trajectories.
At Biograph, we are building a new model of care that elevates every pillar of health and empowers women to live not only longer lives, but healthier, more fulfilling ones.
Elevate Your Healthspan
Discover how Biograph's integrated, personalized approach can transform your approach to women's health.
Written by Yihan Chen
Clinic Physician
Dr. Chen is a Clinic Physician at Biograph NYC. She joined Biograph after building her expertise at the intersection of innovation and academia. Gaining frontline experience as a Primary Care Physician and Clinical Product Lead at a preventive healthcare startup (Forward), and further honed her skills as a Clinical Instructor at UCLA. Her foundation includes an MD from Tulane University School of Medicine and completing both residency and Chief Residency in Internal Medicine at UCLA.
References
Kulminski AM, Culminskaya IV, Ukraintseva SV, Arbeev KG, Land KC, Yashin AI. Sex-specific health deterioration and mortality: the morbidity-mortality paradox over age and time. Exp Gerontol. 2008 Dec;43(12):1052-7. doi: 10.1016/j.exger.2008.09.007. Epub 2008 Sep 20. PMID: 18835429; PMCID: PMC2703431. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2703431/
El Khoudary, S. R., et al. "Menopause Transition and Cardiovascular Disease Risk: Implications for Timing of Early Prevention: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association." Circulation, 2020, DOI: 10.1161/CIR.0000000000000912. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000912
Cao Q, Tan CC, Xu W, Hu H, Cao XP, Dong Q, Tan L, Yu JT. The Prevalence of Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. J Alzheimers Dis. 2020;73(3):1157-1166. doi: 10.3233/JAD-191092. PMID: 31884487. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31884487/
Gong J, Harris K, Lipnicki DM, Castro-Costa E, Lima-Costa MF, Diniz BS, Xiao S, Lipton RB, Katz MJ, Wang C, Preux PM, Guerchet M, Gbessemehlan A, Ritchie K, Ancelin ML, Skoog I, Najar J, Sterner TR, Scarmeas N, Yannakoulia M, Kosmidis MH, Guaita A, Rolandi E, Davin A, Gureje O, Trompet S, Gussekloo J, Riedel-Heller S, Pabst A, Röhr S, Shahar S, Singh DKA, Rivan NFM, Boxtel MV, Köhler S, Ganguli M, Chang CC, Jacobsen E, Haan M, Ding D, Zhao Q, Xiao Z, Narazaki K, Chen T, Chen S, Ng TP, Gwee X, Numbers K, Mather KA, Scazufca M, Lobo A, De-la-Cámara C, Lobo E, Sachdev PS, Brodaty H, Hackett ML, Peters SAE, Woodward M; Cohort Studies of Memory in an International Consortium (COSMIC). Sex differences in dementia risk and risk factors: Individual-participant data analysis using 21 cohorts across six continents from the COSMIC consortium. Alzheimers Dement. 2023 Aug;19(8):3365-3378. doi: 10.1002/alz.12962. Epub 2023 Feb 15. PMID: 36790027; PMCID: PMC10955774. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36790027/
Rossouw JE, Aragaki AK, Manson JE, et al. Menopausal Hormone Therapy and Cardiovascular Diseases in Women With Vasomotor Symptoms: A Secondary Analysis of the Women’s Health Initiative Randomized Clinical Trials. JAMA Intern Med. Published online September 15, 2025. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.4510 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2838720
Nerattini, M., Jett, S., Andy, C., Carlton, C., Zarate, C., Boneu, C., Battista, M., Pahlajani, S., Loeb-Zeitlin, S., Havryulik, Y., Williams, S., Christos, P., Fink, M., Brinton, R. D., & Mosconi, L. (2023). Systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of menopause hormone therapy on risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2023.1260427
Lily N Dastmalchi, Martha Gulati, Age at menarche and cardiovascular risk: a moving target of risk assessment in women, European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, Volume 32, Issue 10, August 2025, Pages 867–869, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurjpc/zwaf318
Wang Y, Stuart JJ, Rich-Edwards JW, et al. Menstrual Cycle Regularity and Length Across the Reproductive Lifespan and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease. JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(10):e2238513. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.38513 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2797622
Gaps in the Women's Health Landscape
For too long, the medical landscape has been skewed. Clinical trials and medical research have predominantly featured male participants, meaning our understanding of disease and physiology is often male-centric. This exclusion has led to a deficit in knowledge regarding unique female health trajectories, resulting in guidelines and diagnostic criteria that frequently fail to capture the nuances of female biology.
The data is stark: while women statistically live longer than men, they also experience a greater proportion of their lives in suboptimal health. This is a phenomenon known as the morbidity-mortality paradox and is particularly evident in midlife, where hormonal shifts trigger widespread physiologic changes. These changes, including increased cardiovascular and metabolic risk, bone mass loss, and cognitive decline, are profound, yet frequently undertreated or misattributed to aging. Current market solutions often focus narrowly on symptom relief. While essential for quality of life, this approach misses the opportunity to address fundamental, long-term risks. Biograph’s model is comprehensive, integrating strategies for immediate symptom relief with an evidence-based plan to address the root causes of disease and optimize healthspan.
Early Milestones Inform Preventive Health Strategies
A woman’s health risks begin to accumulate long before perimenopause, building over the course of her entire lifetime. Hormonal patterns established early in life can significantly influence later-life cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurological health. For instance, the age of menarche and menstrual cycle regularity and length correlate with risks for cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, and even dementia decades later. These early milestones provide key information that should inform preventive health strategies throughout a woman’s life.
Conditions like Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) are too often only viewed from a reproductive perspective. PCOS is fundamentally a metabolic disorder that predisposes women to insulin resistance and cardiometabolic disease. Gestational history, including diabetes and hypertension during pregnancy, also significantly affects risk later in life. This life-course perspective highlights the necessity of healthcare models that track a woman’s health trajectory longitudinally, rather than focusing on episodic care. Biograph's model continuously tracks these trajectories, integrating historical data and early life factors into personalized, long-term prevention plans.
Five Pillars of Women's Longevity
Biograph’s approach is built on a holistic understanding of health, focusing on five interconnected pillars essential for long-term vitality, that take into account women's unique challenges and opportunities.
Cardiovascular Health
Heart disease remains the number one killer of women, a fact often overshadowed by its historical framing as a male condition. Women are also disproportionately affected by stroke, which presents at younger ages and often with worse outcomes. Women’s heart attack symptoms can present differently, and their risk escalates sharply post-menopause due to declining estrogen. Advanced diagnostics like ApoB, Lp(a), Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) scans, and Coronary CT Angiography (CTA) enable precise identification and proactive intervention against cardiovascular threats before they manifest as disease.
Neurologic Health
Women bear a disproportionate burden of dementia, and midlife hormonal fluctuations significantly impact cognition, mood, and sleep. These changes are physiologic responses that affect cognitive reserve. Brain health is supported through comprehensive assessments, including ApoE genotyping, brain MRIs, and neurocognitive assessments, which enable strategies that bolster cognitive resilience.
Metabolic Health
Metabolic shifts accompanying perimenopause, including changes in weight, fat distribution, and insulin sensitivity, signal increased risk for diabetes and cardiometabolic disease. Conditions like PCOS, which as mentioned above is intrinsically a metabolic disorder, highlight how women’s health issues have been narrowly framed, often focusing solely on fertility. Employing DEXA scans to assess body composition, advanced biomarkers to detect early insulin resistance, and whole-body MRI to identify reversible conditions like fatty liver disease allows for earlier and more effective intervention.
Cancer Prevention
Midlife marks a rise in the risk for various cancers, including breast, ovarian, uterine, and colon cancers. Standard-of-care screenings can be effective, but are limited to detecting only a few cancer types and screening adherence often wanes during these demanding years. A proactive strategy goes further by complementing routine screenings with advanced tests like multi-cancer early detection blood tests and whole-body MRI. This personalized approach to risk-stratification equips women with powerful tools for early detection, which in turn can improve treatment outcomes.
Quality of Life
Symptoms such as hot flashes, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and mood shifts can significantly diminish a woman's healthspan. Other metrics including signs of low bone mass and decreased strength can impact both healthspan and lifespan. All of these signals must be validated and integrated into a comprehensive health plan. By addressing their root causes alongside the other pillars, women are empowered to experience not just longevity, but a high quality of life.
Biograph's multidisciplinary team and advanced diagnostics allow for assessment and intervention across all five pillars, offering personalized strategies that extend beyond simple symptom management.
CASE STUDY
From Overwhelmed to Empowered: Navigating Midlife Health
A woman in her late 40s came to Biograph seeking to understand several health concerns that she attributed to general aging and perimenopause. She was particularly worried about her recent weight gain, increasing anxiety and fatigue, and persistent high blood pressure. To make matters worse, feeling "not like herself" had led to lifestyle choices that created a vicious cycle of further worsening symptoms and health metrics.
Biograph's comprehensive diagnostics revealed increased risk in several pillars of health, including Cardiovascular and Quality of Life: stage 2 range hypertension, low VO2 max, low mobility score, insomnia, and moderate-to-severe anxiety and depression, all of which were exacerbated by wide hormonal fluctuations during the menopause transition. After working closely with her to make sense of each assessment, she gained clarity on the interconnectedness of her mental health, lifestyle, and physical well-being.
She received actionable insights for mood management, targeted lifestyle interventions from a care team of physicians, dietitians and exercise physiologists, and personalized medication advice. Importantly, she left feeling heard and empowered to take agency over her health.
This case underscores the profound importance of a holistic assessment that connects seemingly unrelated symptoms to lifestyle factors and underlying physiology, many of which are unique to women.
The Biograph Paradigm Shift for Women's Health
Biograph fundamentally changes the standard of care for women by shifting from a reactive, symptom-focused model to one that is proactive, data-driven, and deeply personalized. Our approach moves beyond treating ailments as they arise to understanding the whole person and optimizing their health across their entire lifespan. This represents a significant paradigm shift:
From Reactive to Proactive
We move beyond waiting for symptoms, actively seeking to identify and mitigate risks before they become problems.
From Symptom-Only to Lifespan + Healthspan
Our focus is not just on extending lifespan, but on maximizing healthspan, ensuring vitality and well-being throughout life.
From Fragmented to Integrated Care
A multidisciplinary team collaborates to provide comprehensive care, connecting dots across different health domains.
From One-Size-Fits-All to Personalized Prevention
Tailored strategies are developed based on an individual's unique data, genetics, and lifestyle, including hormone testing and therapy as clinically indicated.
This personalized, evolving strategy is essential because the women's health care gap cannot be closed by treating symptoms alone. It requires addressing risk, resilience, and prevention opportunities across the entire arc of a woman’s life. Midlife health is a particularly powerful inflection point. By reframing perimenopause and menopause as opportunities for intervention, not decline, we can profoundly shift women’s long-term trajectories.
At Biograph, we are building a new model of care that elevates every pillar of health and empowers women to live not only longer lives, but healthier, more fulfilling ones.
Elevate Your Healthspan
Discover how Biograph's integrated, personalized approach can transform your approach to women's health.
Written by Yihan Chen
Clinic Physician
Dr. Chen is a Clinic Physician at Biograph NYC. She joined Biograph after building her expertise at the intersection of innovation and academia. Gaining frontline experience as a Primary Care Physician and Clinical Product Lead at a preventive healthcare startup (Forward), and further honed her skills as a Clinical Instructor at UCLA. Her foundation includes an MD from Tulane University School of Medicine and completing both residency and Chief Residency in Internal Medicine at UCLA.
References
Kulminski AM, Culminskaya IV, Ukraintseva SV, Arbeev KG, Land KC, Yashin AI. Sex-specific health deterioration and mortality: the morbidity-mortality paradox over age and time. Exp Gerontol. 2008 Dec;43(12):1052-7. doi: 10.1016/j.exger.2008.09.007. Epub 2008 Sep 20. PMID: 18835429; PMCID: PMC2703431. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2703431/
El Khoudary, S. R., et al. "Menopause Transition and Cardiovascular Disease Risk: Implications for Timing of Early Prevention: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association." Circulation, 2020, DOI: 10.1161/CIR.0000000000000912. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000912
Cao Q, Tan CC, Xu W, Hu H, Cao XP, Dong Q, Tan L, Yu JT. The Prevalence of Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. J Alzheimers Dis. 2020;73(3):1157-1166. doi: 10.3233/JAD-191092. PMID: 31884487. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31884487/
Gong J, Harris K, Lipnicki DM, Castro-Costa E, Lima-Costa MF, Diniz BS, Xiao S, Lipton RB, Katz MJ, Wang C, Preux PM, Guerchet M, Gbessemehlan A, Ritchie K, Ancelin ML, Skoog I, Najar J, Sterner TR, Scarmeas N, Yannakoulia M, Kosmidis MH, Guaita A, Rolandi E, Davin A, Gureje O, Trompet S, Gussekloo J, Riedel-Heller S, Pabst A, Röhr S, Shahar S, Singh DKA, Rivan NFM, Boxtel MV, Köhler S, Ganguli M, Chang CC, Jacobsen E, Haan M, Ding D, Zhao Q, Xiao Z, Narazaki K, Chen T, Chen S, Ng TP, Gwee X, Numbers K, Mather KA, Scazufca M, Lobo A, De-la-Cámara C, Lobo E, Sachdev PS, Brodaty H, Hackett ML, Peters SAE, Woodward M; Cohort Studies of Memory in an International Consortium (COSMIC). Sex differences in dementia risk and risk factors: Individual-participant data analysis using 21 cohorts across six continents from the COSMIC consortium. Alzheimers Dement. 2023 Aug;19(8):3365-3378. doi: 10.1002/alz.12962. Epub 2023 Feb 15. PMID: 36790027; PMCID: PMC10955774. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36790027/
Rossouw JE, Aragaki AK, Manson JE, et al. Menopausal Hormone Therapy and Cardiovascular Diseases in Women With Vasomotor Symptoms: A Secondary Analysis of the Women’s Health Initiative Randomized Clinical Trials. JAMA Intern Med. Published online September 15, 2025. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.4510 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2838720
Nerattini, M., Jett, S., Andy, C., Carlton, C., Zarate, C., Boneu, C., Battista, M., Pahlajani, S., Loeb-Zeitlin, S., Havryulik, Y., Williams, S., Christos, P., Fink, M., Brinton, R. D., & Mosconi, L. (2023). Systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of menopause hormone therapy on risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2023.1260427
Lily N Dastmalchi, Martha Gulati, Age at menarche and cardiovascular risk: a moving target of risk assessment in women, European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, Volume 32, Issue 10, August 2025, Pages 867–869, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurjpc/zwaf318
Wang Y, Stuart JJ, Rich-Edwards JW, et al. Menstrual Cycle Regularity and Length Across the Reproductive Lifespan and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease. JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(10):e2238513. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.38513 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2797622
Up next
