News
Understanding inflammaging and how preventative health data could help lessen its impact
By Dominique Kent, CEO, Bluecrest
As women, we spend much of our lives juggling, I know this from my own experience.
Running a business, raising a family, caring for parents as they get older, the list is endless. Somewhere in the mix, our own health slips down the priority list.
That is why the idea of inflammaging resonates so strongly with me.
It is a quiet, creeping process in the body: low-level inflammation that builds up over time and accelerates ageing.
Unlike a sprained ankle or a winter flu, you cannot feel it happening.
Yet it’s there, silently increasing the risk of conditions that affect so many women in later life such as heart disease, osteoporosis and dementia.
My background before Bluecrest was in the care sector where I saw first-hand what happens when people live longer but not necessarily well.
Too many spent their final years dealing with pain, frailty and loss of independence.
It shaped my belief that the goal for us all should not just be about lifespan but healthspan: the years we live in good health, able to do the things we enjoy and remain independent.
Inflammaging is a direct and silent threat to this, so it’s something that needs to be addressed.
We as women face some particular challenges here. Hormonal changes during menopause remove a natural buffer against inflammation. Autoimmune conditions, which are often inflammatory, are far more common in women.
There are pressures outside of our biologies too, which often fall more heavily on women: stress, trauma, poor sleep, carrying the invisible load of family responsibilities.
All of these add to the inflammatory burden.
The danger is that inflammaging is invisible, you don’t wake up one day and feel it.
Instead it builds, and its impact often only shows when something serious has developed. This is what makes it so risky.
We already know that women’s health issues are often picked up late, misdiagnosed or brushed aside. Add a hidden process like inflammaging into the mix and you see why prevention is so important.
That focus on prevention is what drew me to Bluecrest.
Dominique Kent
The NHS has made prevention a key part of its long-term plan, and rightly so. If we can spot risks earlier, through small and regular interventions, we can act earlier. That is good for individuals and for the health system.
Inflammaging links directly to so many of the chronic conditions that we see in the headlines, the ones that put the heaviest strain on the NHS, so tackling it at source makes sense.
At Bluecrest, I see how empowering it can be when women come for a health check.
Often it is the first time in years they have put themselves at the top of the list, rather than convincing their husbands or parents to get checked out.
The results are not always perfect, but even when they show areas of concern, women tell me they feel in control.
They leave with a plan, and with knowledge which can be a huge turning point.
I also think about this in the context of business.
Midlife is often when women are at the peak of their careers, yet it is also when health issues start to appear. If hidden risks like inflammaging go unaddressed, we lose women from the workforce at a time when their skills and leadership are most needed.
For me, that’s why prevention is not just a personal issue, it is an economic one.
The good news is that there are things we can do.
A balanced diet, regular exercise, proper sleep and managing stress all help reduce inflammation. Stopping smoking and cutting back on alcohol make a difference too.
But it is unrealistic to leave it all to the individual – and we’ll fail if we add this to an already never-ending list of responsibilities that women take on.
This is where femtech has such a vital role to play.
For too long, women have lacked access to the kind of information that would allow them to make confident and informed health decisions. Now we are seeing new technologies emerge that can change that.
From wearable devices that track sleep and stress, to apps that monitor cycle changes, to biomarker tests that give an early picture of cardiovascular or metabolic risk, women can increasingly access the data they need to understand their own bodies and act sooner.
At Bluecrest, we see how powerful it is when women are given personalised health information alongside the expertise and support to understand it. It shifts prevention from being a vague idea into something tangible.
When data is made accessible, women are more likely to act, whether that is adjusting lifestyle choices, speaking to a GP, or booking follow-up tests.
For femtech to really deliver, though, it has to be part of a bigger ecosystem.
Women need healthcare services that take their concerns seriously, workplaces that respect their health needs, and innovations that are affordable and fit in with their lives.
You’re not going to go and get your inflammation levels checked if you have to take a day off work or caring responsibilities and travel 50 miles to get there.
Data is only empowering when it is clear, trusted and connected to practical next steps.
That is the opportunity now: to combine the science of inflammaging with the growing power of technology, so that women can extend not only lifespan but healthspan, with more years lived in good health and independence.
As a female CEO, I feel a responsibility to use my voice on issues like this.
Women’s health has too often been overlooked, underfunded and under-researched.
Inflammaging may be silent, but it does not have to remain invisible.
By naming it, understanding it, and taking action early, we can give women more years of healthy, independent life.
Australia’s drug advisory committee has recommended wider funding of triptorelin for women with breast cancer or endometriosis.
The recommendation comes after AstraZeneca announced plans to remove Zoladex from the market, risking leaving more than 7,500 women with breast cancer without an alternative treatment.
Both medicines block the release of oestrogen and testosterone and can be used as part of treatment, or for fertility preservation, in some forms of cancer.
The Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee met urgently in July and recommended making triptorelin unrestricted under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), which would mean it was funded for all uses.
The drug has been listed on the PBS for prostate cancer since 2006.
Triptorelin and Zoladex can also be used to treat endometriosis and to block puberty for either precocious puberty or gender-affirming care.
Vicki Durston, director of policy and advocacy at Breast Cancer Network Australia, described the recommendation as “a significant step forward” and said access to the medicine could mean the difference between life and death for some patients.
She said some women had already chosen to have their ovaries removed because of uncertainty over Zoladex supplies.
Marilla Druitt, Victorian state chair of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said it remained unclear whether triptorelin would work exactly the same way as Zoladex, but the recommendation was likely to be positive for patients with endometriosis and pelvic pain.
She said: “I’m glad we’ve got an alternative.”
“That’s fantastic, and it remains to be seen whether or not it will be as good, but pain is so complex, pain is a really hard thing to study because it’s got so many contributors.”
Druitt said further research would be needed after the medicine was introduced.
If accepted by the federal government, the recommendation would also allow PBS funding of triptorelin for puberty suppression in precocious puberty and gender-affirming care.
This would make gender-affirming care federally funded through the PBS for the first time and would remove a financial barrier for transgender children in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Stuart Aitken, medical director of Gender Health Australia, said the recommendation had sparked “absolute joy” among his patients.
He said: “It takes away a huge barrier to accessing evidence-based care.”
“It means that the ban has a very limited effect.”
By Women’s HealthX
As healthcare organisations navigate tightening compliance mandates, evolving reimbursement frameworks, and shifting health economics, the single most critical asset for leadership is operational visibility into what their industry counterparts are executing right now.
Ahead of the Women’s HealthX marketplace in Boston this December, a cross-functional steering committee of health plans, hospital networks, biopharma innovators, and enterprise employers has launched the definitive 2026 U.S. Health Infrastructure Survey.
The objective of this brief, multi-state index is to bypass abstract market fluff and map out exactly how the country’s elite healthcare stakeholders are practically structuring their 2027 budgets, clinical protocols, and technology procurement guidelines.
Some of the questions we are asking:
- Health Plans & Payers “What is the biggest operational barrier to expanding women’s health coverage?”
- Health Systems & Providers “What is the biggest women’s health priority for health systems over the next 24 months?”
- Pharma & Life Sciences “What is the biggest commercial hurdle facing women’s health innovation?”
- Employers & Benefits Leaders “Which women’s health challenge creates the greatest workforce impact?”
By contributing just 60 seconds of your operational insight to the index, you will ensure your specific sector’s parameters are accurately represented.
In return for your participation, you will secure a priority, pre-ordered copy of the completed 30-page intelligence report when the final data drops this September!
See where your direct peer groups are drawing their line in the sand for the upcoming fiscal year.
Contribute 60 seconds and pre-order your national benchmark report
Women’s HealthX 2026 | From Rhetoric to Results
Encore Boston Harbor | December 3-4 2026
Bypass abstract market rhetoric to evaluate real-world health economics, regulatory compliance mandates, and care delivery systems.
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Sahar Abid is a Science Associate at Ema EQ, where she works on cultural sensitivity and bias in AI.
A woman asks an AI health assistant about postpartum depression.
She mentions that her in-laws are telling her to “push through” and skip medical help, even as her symptoms get harder to manage. She never says where she is from or names her background.
The assistant describes the condition and gives her a hotline number. It sounds correct, but it misses what she needs.
That gap is more common than the industry admits, and it points to a blind spot in how we test health AI for bias.
Most bias testing looks at what people explicitly say.
The typical way to check an AI for bias is to label a prompt with someone’s demographic details and see if the answer changes. That catches some problems but misses a bigger one.
Most people do not lead with their identity. They lead with their situation. The woman above told the assistant everything it needed to help her, just not in the form of a label.
Her real question was not only “what is postpartum depression?” It was “how do I get care when the people around me don’t want me to?
When family members hold sway over health decisions, and in many communities they do, advice that asks someone to overrule their family is not something they can act on.
The AI didn’t say anything factually wrong. It answered a different question than the one she was living.
We call this culturally implicit bias, meaning the AI misses the cultural context a situation implies rather than the context a person spells out.
When systems are trained to notice only the explicit cues, they fall back on a default answer built for the majority. For everyone else, the response can feel generic, off-target, or discouraging enough that they stop looking for help.
In health, that is not small. The people most likely to be missed are often the ones the system already underserves.
What we set out to test.
At Ema, we wanted to know how well AI picks up on cultural context that is implied but never stated. So we built our own way to test for it, across a range of communities and real situations like postpartum depression and fertility, using questions that carried cultural meaning without announcing it.
The patterns were consistent. Models often missed the meaning underneath the question. They dropped the specific details a person did share and smoothed them into something generic.
And even when they pointed toward real care, they tended to offer one option instead of choices that might actually fit a person’s life. Any one of those can be the difference between someone following the advice and walking away from care.
Why this matters for anyone building health AI.
Getting this right is the right thing to do, and it also works better.
When an answer reflects a person’s real context, people trust and act on the recommendations more, so they get the help and support they need.
Testing for it is harder than the shortcut most teams use. Swapping a name or a demographic label in and out is easy. Checking whether a model actually understands the human context around a question takes more care.
The shortcut teaches models to perform cultural competence instead of practicing it. No matter how much or how little someone chooses to share, they deserve an answer that is warm, complete, and usable.
A better question.
The bar for equitable health AI should be “does it serve someone who never told you who they are?” It is the harder test, but it determines whether real people get help.
The work of getting there is far from finished, and it is exactly what we are building toward at Ema.
Sources: Naidoo, V., & Chadha, K. K. (2025), Culturally responsive AI chatbots: from framework to field evidence, Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. Souligne, N., & Subbian, V. (2026), FairLogue: A toolkit for intersectional fairness analysis in clinical machine learning models.
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