Diagnosis
The rise of preventive gynaecology: What women need to know
Co-written By Dr Claire Gillvray and Tarang Majmudar, Welbeck Cambridge (2026)
Gynaecological cancers, cervical, ovarian, uterine, vaginal, and vulvar, pose a significant health risk across all age groups.
While treatment has advanced in recent years, early detection remains the single most crucial factor in improving survival, reducing the need for invasive treatments, and preserving quality of life.
Why Early Detection Matters
When gynaecological cancers are detected early, the five-year survival rate exceeds 90 per cent.
In contrast, late-stage diagnosis can reduce survival chances by more than half. Early detection truly can mean the difference between life and death.
In England, the introduction of cervical screening in 1998 and HPV vaccination in 2008 has drastically reduced the incidence and mortality associated with cervical cancer.
For endometrial cancer, postmenopausal bleeding is a red flag symptom, prompting timely medical intervention and generally resulting in early diagnosis.
Yet, ovarian and vulval cancers often go unnoticed.
Ovarian cancer’s vague symptoms such as bloating, abdominal discomfort, and appetite changes, are frequently mistaken for benign conditions.
Vulval cancer symptoms like itching or soreness are often overlooked, especially post-menopause.
To improve early detection, a threefold strategy is essential:
- Screening
- Symptom recognition
- Lifestyle modification
1. Screening
Cervical cancer is one of the few gynaecological cancers that is both preventable and detectable through routine screening.
Caused primarily by the human papillomavirus (HPV), cervical cancer rates have dropped significantly due to HPV vaccination and cervical screening programmes.
In 2023, NHS England outlined its goal to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040.
Despite high HPV vaccination coverage (approximately 80 per cent), screening uptake has declined, particularly among younger women, where participation has dropped to 70 per cent.
The upcoming introduction of self-sampling for HPV aims to address this gap and improve participation.
However, no effective population-wide screening methods currently exist for ovarian, uterine, vaginal, or vulvar cancers.
This reality reinforces the importance of self-awareness, recognising symptoms, and attending regular gynaecological check-ups.
Dr Claire Gillvray
2. Recognising Warning Symptoms
Awareness of key symptoms is vital for early diagnosis:
- Cervical cancer: abnormal vaginal bleeding, post-coital bleeding, unusual discharge
- Ovarian cancer: persistent bloating, pelvic discomfort, urinary urgency, loss of appetite, weight loss
- Uterine cancer: postmenopausal bleeding, irregular or heavy periods
- Vaginal cancer: unusual bleeding or discharge
- Vulvar cancer: itching, pain, lumps, or ulceration
Although many of these symptoms can have benign causes, persistence or change from the norm should always prompt medical review.
Historically, women’s gynaecological symptoms have often been minimised or dismissed.
This has led to diagnostic delays for conditions like endometriosis, which still takes nearly 9 years on average to diagnose.
Young women are particularly vulnerable, with symptoms too often attributed to hormonal changes or stress.
Rather than placing blame, we must push for better education, research funding, and structural support to help clinicians, especially in primary care, identify early warning signs across diverse age groups and health backgrounds.
3. Lifestyle and Risk Reduction
Healthy habits can reduce the risk of several gynaecological conditions:
- Maintain a healthy weight
- Eat a balanced, nutrient-rich diet
- Avoid tobacco and limit alcohol
- Get vaccinated for HPV and practice safe sex
- Attend regular health checks
- Manage conditions like diabetes and hypertension
- Seek genetic counselling if there’s a family history of breast, bowel, or gynaecological cancers
Prevention isn’t only about medical care, it’s also about empowering people with the knowledge and tools to take charge of their health.
The Role of Men and Partners in Gynaecological Health
Preventative gynaecology isn’t a “women-only” issue. Men and partners play an essential role in recognising early warning signs, supporting open health conversations, and advocating for equitable care.
Awareness campaigns must include all genders, so that everyone can support informed decisions, challenge stigma, and help normalise seeking help early.
The Rise of FemTech
Preventative gynaecology is being transformed by FemTech with technologies including:
- Menstrual tracking apps
- Wearable hormone monitors
- At-home diagnostics
- AI-powered symptom tools
These innovations give people more insight into their own health and more confidence when seeking care.
Yet, technology alone isn’t enough. It must be paired with systemic changes in how symptoms are recognised and responded to.
Chronic pain, abnormal bleeding, and fatigue are too often normalised, leading to prolonged suffering and delayed diagnoses.
Empowering Through Self-Advocacy
Tarang Majmudar
A central tenet of preventative gynaecology is self-advocacy. This involves:
- Know your normal—cycles, mood, energy, libido
- Use tech to track symptoms and patterns
- Push for answers when something feels “off”
- Recognise that stress, sleep, and environment all play a role in health
Empowerment also means expecting and demanding respectful, informed care. It’s about being heard, not dismissed.
Prevention in Action: Real Progress
We’re already seeing the benefits of preventative measures:
- The HPV vaccine is reducing cervical cancer rates significantly.
- Early hormone therapy during perimenopause can protect bone, brain, and heart health.
- Growing awareness of reproductive conditions is shortening the diagnostic journey for many.
When supported by data and technology, people can have more meaningful conversations with healthcare providers and make informed choices about their bodies and care.
Looking Forward
For individuals:
Use digital tools to track trends and flag changes. Treat this data as a conversation starter, not a diagnosis.
For clinicians:
Engage with new technologies. Ask proactively about menstrual, hormonal, and sexual health.
For innovators:
Design inclusive, accessible tools for all bodies, all ages, all ethnicities.
For policymakers and researchers:
Support funding for research that focuses on earlier detection, better diagnostics, and equitable access to care.
The future of gynaecological care is not just about reacting to disease, it’s about preventing it, detecting it early, and empowering everyone to take control of their health.
Preventative gynaecology is more than a trend, it’s a necessity.
With education, accessible tools, cultural change, and collaborative action, we can make early detection the norm, not the exception.
Female sex may not raise stroke risk across all atrial fibrillation (AF) patients, with higher risk mainly seen in women aged 75 and older, a study suggests.
Researchers said stroke prevention for women with the condition should be more personalised, especially for patients under 75.
Dr Amitabh C Pandey, director of cardiovascular translational research at Tulane University School of Medicine, said: “For years, female sex has been included as a risk factor along with other factors such as high blood pressure and diabetes, meaning women were more likely to be prescribed anticoagulants.
“Our study shows younger women may not have as much added stroke risk as previously thought, while older women, particularly those over 75, appear to have a higher risk that deserves close attention.”
The new Tulane University study challenges a long-standing assumption in heart care that being female automatically increases stroke risk for patients with atrial fibrillation.
Atrial fibrillation, often called AF, is a common heart rhythm disorder that causes the heart to beat irregularly.
It is associated with a higher risk of stroke and is often treated with anticoagulants, also known as blood thinners.
The study found that stroke risk did not increase equally across all female patients with AF.
Instead, researchers said being female may act more as a risk modifier, with increased stroke risk seen primarily among women aged 75 and older or those with a greater burden of other health conditions.
Clinicians often use a scoring system to decide whether people with AF should be prescribed blood thinners.
The system gives points for factors including age, heart failure, diabetes, previous stroke, vascular disease and high blood pressure.
Women also receive one point for sex alone.
Researchers said this can mean women with AF become eligible for blood thinners earlier or more often than men with otherwise similar risk profiles.
While blood thinners can help prevent clot-related strokes, they can also increase the risk of bruising, prolonged bleeding, gastrointestinal bleeding and other serious complications.
The researchers analysed approximately 950,000 patients with AF using TriNetX, a large anonymised electronic health record database.
They compared stroke outcomes between male and female patients across three age groups: younger than 65, 65 to 74, and 75 and older.
Male and female patients were matched based on age, other health problems and whether they had been prescribed anticoagulation medicine.
Among patients younger than 75, the study found no significant difference in one-year stroke risk between men and women.
However, among patients aged 75 and older, women had a modest but statistically significant increase in stroke risk compared with men.
In patients aged 75 and older with no additional risk factors beyond age, women had about one additional stroke per 629 patients compared with their male counterparts.
The findings support growing interest in a newer AF risk score, known as CHA2DS2-VA, which removes sex as a standalone risk factor.
However, researchers said more studies are needed and medical guidance remains inconsistent.
Han Feng, assistant professor at Tulane University School of Medicine, said: “This general approach came from women being underrepresented in AFib trials and studies comprising only about one-third of study populations.
“Our study shows not all women with AFib have the same risk profile, and these decisions should be individualised.
Pandey said: “These findings highlight the need for modern tools and approaches that can personalise risk profiles to individuals.
“The goal is not to undertreat patients who need stroke prevention, but to better identify who is most likely to benefit from anticoagulation and who may be exposed to unnecessary risk.”
AI may help speed breast cancer diagnosis for high-risk women after abnormal mammograms, a study suggests.
Women with abnormal mammograms often wait weeks to learn whether they have breast cancer.
Researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley said an AI-guided workflow could help reduce that wait by quickly identifying those most likely to have the disease. Some women could move from imaging to evaluation, and sometimes biopsy, in a single day.
Dr Maggie Chung, first author of the study, said: “This is a really an exciting time.
“This moves us closer to personalised care, where we can tailor a plan so that each patient gets the right intervention at the right time.”
The study used an open-source AI model called Mirai.
The model was trained on hundreds of thousands of mammograms linked to patients’ cancer outcomes.
A mammogram is an X-ray scan of the breast used to look for signs of cancer. A biopsy involves taking a small tissue sample to test for disease.
The AI tool is designed to detect subtle patterns in screening mammograms and predict a woman’s cancer risk.
Researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley applied the model to more than 4,100 screening mammograms at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
Mirai identified 525 women, about 12.7 per cent of screened patients, as high risk.
Those patients could receive an interpretation of their mammograms immediately after the scan and have additional diagnostic imaging for suspicious areas on the same day.
Some women who needed biopsies were also able to have them on the same day.
The researchers said Mirai reduced the wait time for diagnostic evaluation from several weeks to about an hour.
For women who were ultimately diagnosed with breast cancer, it reduced the average wait for biopsy from more than two months to fewer than 10 days.
The researchers stressed that Mirai does not replace radiologists or make diagnoses on its own.
Instead, it acts as a triage tool to help physicians identify the patients who can benefit most from accelerated care.
The team analysed more than 114,000 archival mammograms before launching the programme, to ensure the model would capture enough high-risk patients without overloading the clinic with too many expedited evaluations.
The researchers said they hope AI will support a more personalised approach to breast cancer screening tailored to each patient’s breast cancer risk.
Chung said: “Right now, many women follow the same screening schedule but their individual risk can be very different.
“AI risk assessment gives us the chance to identify the women most likely to benefit from expedited care and get them what they need.”
Adam Yala, senior author of the study and a data scientist at UC Berkeley, said: “This is a powerful example of how AI can be a collaborative partner for physicians.
“It shows how we can improve care when we bring clinicians and data scientists together to design these systems.”
Type 2 diabetes diagnoses are rising twice as fast in women under 40 as in women over 40, new data shows.
Type 2 diabetes is a serious condition and can lead to complications such as heart attacks and strokes. When it develops in younger people, it can be more aggressive and have more severe and acute effects.
Diagnoses in women under 40 rose by 47 per cent between 2017/18 and 2023/24. By comparison, diagnoses rose by 22 per cent in women aged 40 to 79.
During the same period, type 2 diabetes diagnoses in men under 40 increased by 34 per cent.
Diabetes UK said it is concerned about the follow-up care offered to women who have had gestational diabetes, also known as GDM, which increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes after pregnancy.
Gestational diabetes is high blood sugar that develops during pregnancy and usually goes away after birth, but it raises the risk of type 2 diabetes later.
Colette Marshall, chief executive at Diabetes UK, said: “These figures should be a wake-up call. Type 2 diabetes is rising twice as fast in younger women compared to older women, and a crucial opportunity for prevention is being missed. Every diagnosis is life-changing, but when it develops in younger people, type 2 diabetes is even more aggressive.
“Pregnancy shouldn’t be a pathway to ill health. Yet despite facing a much higher risk of type 2 diabetes, too many women with GDM receive little or no follow-up care after pregnancy.
“As the Government turns its Strategy into action, support for women who have had gestational diabetes must not be overlooked.”
Last year, the NHS published the first national GDM audit for England in 2024/25, which revealed inconsistencies in follow-up care.
Only 57 per cent of women with GDM received an annual HbA1c test, which should be offered to every woman with GDM.
An HbA1c test measures average blood sugar levels over the previous two to three months.
Only 4.5 per cent of women had received support through the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme.
The report also found that 11 per cent of women developed prediabetes within five years of having GDM, while 15 per cent developed type 2 diabetes within 10 years.
Prediabetes means blood sugar levels are higher than normal and a person has a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
A recent survey funded by Diabetes UK also found that more than a third of women with GDM felt abandoned by healthcare services after giving birth.
If you live in England and have had gestational diabetes, you can self-refer to the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme, which supports people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. If you live in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales, you can speak to your GP about support.
Diabetes UK has written to women’s health minister Baroness Merron calling for urgent improvements to postnatal support for those diagnosed with GDM during pregnancy.
GDM affects between 10 and 20 per cent of pregnant women, but Diabetes UK said cases have long been underreported and UK-wide data on the condition has not been readily available.
The charity said poor follow-up care for women who have had GDM may be contributing to rising rates of type 2 diabetes in younger women.
It is calling for consistent postnatal follow-ups for women after GDM, more referrals to the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme, greater accountability for improvements in postnatal care, and action on inequalities affecting women from deprived and minority ethnic communities.
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