\u201cIf societies scale access to proven cost-effective preventative interventions, we could instead gain nearly a decade of additional healthy life.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Read: 2026 Women\u2019s Health & Wealth Summit: Addressing women\u2019s hormone health can improve productivity, workforce participation<\/a>\n<\/p>\n Prouse noted that prevention is among the highest return on investment available to organizations that bear the downstream cost when health issues go unmanaged. The current health-care model is focused on sick care, not preventative care, she added, noting the model needs to evolve to become more personalized, proactive, data-informed and continuous.\n<\/p>\n Hormones \u2014 the body\u2019s primary communication system \u2014 affect metabolism, energy, mood, cardiovascular function, bone density, cognitive performance, reproductive health and immune regulation, she said. As a result, hormonal disruption quietly reshapes health trajectories in both men and women throughout adulthood.\n<\/p>\n \u201cHormonal disruption, whether in the form of estrogen decline, testosterone suppression, thyroid dysfunction, [hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal] axis diysregulation, typically precedes formal diagnosis by years. Early intervention changes the arc of disease; late intervention manages the consequences.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Across the health-care system broadly, 90 per cent of spend goes to managing downstream consequences of hormonal and metabolic dysregulation, noted Prouse, whereas preventative care captures roughly five per cent. \u201cWe\u2019re funding the downstream costs of a process whose upstream signals were present and potentially modifiable.\u201d\n<\/p>\n