When the Women’s Health Initiative was announced in 1991, it was set to be the largest women’s health study ever conducted. The WHI scope is massive: the initiative has recruited more than 161,000 women and engaged more than 5,000 scientists from the U.S. and beyond.
“There’s a reason why we’ve won two Team Science awards,” Garnet Anderson, senior vice president and director of the public health sciences division at Fred Hutch and a principal investigator of the Women’s Health Initiative, said at the annual WHI meeting in May.
The WHI Clinical Coordinating Center is located at Fred Hutch Cancer Center.
“WHI is definitely ‘team science,’” Anderson said. “I want to thank all the people who’ve helped create these data over the years, from our dedicated women participants to the people who do the data collection, the outcomes staff and adjudicators, our software engineers and statisticians and our administrative folks. All of you have participated in this and you all make it possible for everyone to have access to these data.”
Credit: Robert Hood / Fred Hutch News Service
WHI’s impact has been significant:
The net health yield for women in the U.S. in the decade after the WHI estrogen plus progestin study was published was approximately 145,000 more quality-adjusted life years than would have occurred in absence of the trial, according to a 2014 study.
The overall economic return from the study indicates that the changes in practice it produced provided a net economic return of $37.1 billion over 10 years (The Cancer Letter, May 9, 2014).
“That one trial saved many billions of dollars in health care costs, due to the sea change in the use of menopausal hormones that these trials induced,” said Ross Prentice, professor emeritus at Fred Hutch and WHI’s first principal investigator.
That one trial saved many billions of dollars in health care costs, due to the sea change in the use of menopausal hormones that these trials induced.
Ross Prentice
Women’s Health Initiative: Research that keeps on giving
By Fred Hutch, July 2, 2025
When it comes to “team science,” the Women’s Health Initiative may be, as they say in the world of sports, the GOAT — the Greatest Of All Time.
Nationally announced in 1991 and backed by $625 million in federal funding from the National Institutes of Health, the WHI is the largest women’s health study ever conducted on the planet, recruiting more than 161,000 women ages 50 to 79 and engaging more than 5,000 scientists from the U.S. and beyond.
Read more in a new article published by Fred Hutch on the Cancer History Project.
The WHI has been in the headlines this spring after investigators were informed on April 21 that the Department of Health and Human Services would be terminating the WHI Regional Center contracts at the end of the current fiscal year.
Then, three days later, HHS reversed the decision (The Cancer Letter, April 25, May 9, 2025).
At a grand rounds lecture at Fred Hutch, Anderson said she often thinks of a comment NIH director Elias Zerhouni made in his closing remarks after the special 2002 NIH symposium where the hormone study findings were shared:
“As you look through the history of science,” Zerhouni said, “the reaction to a new scientific finding, whatever that finding is, is really proportional to the strength of the dogma it overturns.”
Past coverage of the Women’s Health Initiative
- Women’s Health Study To Supplant Need for WHT, Greenwald Says, May 31, 1991
- NIH Selects 16 Clinical Centers for Women’s Health Initiative, April 9, 1993
- WHI Community Prevention Study Concept Approved Nov. 19, 1993
- WHI Revises Protocol After Study Finds High Rate Of Endometrial Hyperplasia, Jan. 27, 1995
- Surprise Finding On HRT Stops Large Trial, Women Advised To Reconsider Long-Term Use Due to Increased Breast Cancer Risk, July 12, 2002
- WHI Investigators Reiterate: Breast Cancer, CHD Risks Too Great For Routine HT Use, Nov. 2, 2002
- Study Confirms Cancer Risk Increase Due To Combined HRT, Jan. 31, 2003
- WHI Update: No Increased Risk Of Cancer With Estrogen-Alone, April 28, 2006
- Risks Of Long-Term HRT Outweigh Benefits, WHI Finds, March 28, 2008
- Women’s Health Initiative Trial Produced $37.1 Billion in Returns, May 9, 2014
- Study shows low-fat diet significantly reduced risk of death after breast cancer June 15, 2018
- Breast cancer patients who exercise pre-diagnosis are at lower risk for heart disease, Sept. 27, 2019
- HHS said it would terminate Women’s Health Initiative, then reconsidered, April 25, 2025
- Women’s Health Initiative funding officially restored, May 9, 2025
- Grilled by Congress, Kennedy defends NIH and NCI budget cuts, freezes, and RIFs, May 16, 2025
Other recent articles from Fred Hutch
One Brother’s Love: A baseball legend, his brother, and the origin of Fred Hutch Cancer Center
By Fred Hutch, July 2, 2025
Our origin story started with legendary baseball player Fred Hutchinson and his brother Bill. To honor Fred’s life and enduring spirit, Dr. Bill Hutchinson founded Fred Hutch Cancer Center, setting the stage for the breakthrough of bone marrow transplantation.
Watch the video on the Cancer History Project.
Paula Charuhas Macris, the world’s first BMT dietitian, celebrates 37 years of nourishing care
By Fred Hutch, July 3, 2025
For 37 years, registered dietitian Paula Charuhas Macris, MS, RD, has been a steady presence at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, using her nutrition expertise to help blood and marrow transplant and cancer patients maintain strength and resilience as they go through treatment.
When she took her first nutrition class as an undergraduate student at the University of Washington in 1979, she felt an immediate connection with the field of nutrition and decided to pursue a degree as a registered dietitian. After obtaining her Bachelor of Arts degree in nutrition, Charuhas Macris went on to earn her master’s degree in nutrition at UW as well.
“I was always interested in pursuing a degree in the health care field,” Charuhas Macris said. “While taking a general nutrition class, it was fascinating to learn how nutrition and diet therapy played a huge role in the management of certain diseases and conditions. I knew then that I wanted to pursue this as a career and decided to apply to the clinical dietetics program to become a registered dietitian.”
Read more and watch the video on the Cancer History Project.
The Cancer History Project is a free, collaborative archive of oncology history that aims to engage the scientific community and the general public in a dialogue on progress in cancer research and discovery.
This project is made possible with the support of our sponsors: the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, ACT for NIH, UK Markey Cancer Center, Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey/RWJBarnabas Health, The University of Kansas Cancer Center, and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.
The Cancer History Project is an initiative of The Cancer Letter, and is backed by 60 partners, spanning academic cancer centers, government agencies, advocacy groups, professional societies, and more.
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