The women’s health and wellness space is booming. The opportunities are real and so are the rewards. This is where you keep up. Welcome to The DXF Edit.
This week’s edit is one of those issues where the stories keep pointing at the same thing: systems built without women in mind, and the bill coming due.
Pfizer just settled 5,500 brain tumor lawsuits because it failed to warn women. The FDA is reviewing the abortion pill on a schedule engineered around an election. The platforms being handed new enforcement power are the same ones that made women spell out “vgna” to stay visible. And the wearables we bought to take back control of our health are making us more anxious, not less.
MONEY MOVES
Your Cardiometabolic Care Plan Shouldn’t Require a Whole Foods Nearby
The healthcare system will write you a meal plan. It will not get you the food.
Vida Health just partnered with Instacart to close that gap. Through Instacart Health’s Fresh Funds technology, registered dietitians build culturally sensitive meal plans across more than 25 cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and members receive category-specific grocery stipends to purchase the actual food. Instacart reaches more than 98% of US households, including 95% of low-income and low-access areas. That last number is the one that matters.
Cardiometabolic conditions, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, disproportionately hit women in midlife and post-menopause. They also disproportionately hit women in lower-income brackets and women of color. Handing those women a meal plan without addressing food access isn’t care. It’s paperwork.
The EHR That Was Built Because the System Nearly Killed Its Co-Founder
She was a hospital doctor. She knew exactly what pre-eclampsia looked like. The system still missed it in her own pregnancy.
Dr. Lailah Kara-Newton survived an undiagnosed pre-eclampsia emergency, a crash caesarean, a NICU admission for her son, and came out the other side with a very specific idea of what needed to be built. She and her sister Fifi Kara launched Aster in 2023: an AI-native electronic health record designed from the ground up for women’s health providers, not retrofitted from a system built for everyone else.
Elation Health, building what it calls the first agentic operating system for primary care, has acquired Aster and is bringing the entire team in-house. Black maternal mortality in the US runs nearly double the rate of white women. Aster addresses precisely the fragmented clinical infrastructure that produces that number.
The women who built this technology did so because the system nearly killed one of them. That’s not a founding story. That’s a brief.
INNOVATION
The Cortisol Wearable That Could Change How Women Understand Their Stress
Cortisol is the word on every wellness feed, every supplement label, every “why am I so tired” Reddit thread. And almost no woman actually knows what hers is doing.
Testing requires a clinic visit, a blood draw, and a single data point captured at a single moment in time. The vast majority of women never bother. Instead, they guess, supplement, and optimize a number they’ve never seen.
Adaptyx Biosciences just changed what’s possible. The Stanford spinout has presented the first continuous, multi-day measurement of free cortisol in humans, a wearable patch that reads the hormone directly from fluid beneath the skin, at minute-level resolution, across multiple days. Presented at the American Diabetes Association’s Scientific Sessions, the data showed the patch accurately tracked cortisol’s natural daily rhythm, including the morning spike and overnight drop, during normal daily life. Over 400 hours of in-body monitoring data now support an FDA Class II pathway.
Cortisol is the upstream hormone driving glucose, blood pressure, inflammation, immune function, and recovery. It’s also central to conditions that disproportionately affect women, adrenal dysfunction, chronic fatigue, hormonal dysregulation, difficult-to-control type 2 diabetes.
The 8am blood draw clinicians call a cortisol test is a photograph of a river. This is the first time anyone has watched it move.
The Leading Killer in Pregnancy Has a Simple Fix. Stop Sitting So Much.
The thing most likely to kill you in pregnancy isn’t dramatic. It’s your couch.
A University of Iowa-led study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association followed 470 pregnant women across all three trimesters. The daily pattern linked to nearly a 30% lower risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy , pre-eclampsia, gestational hypertension, conditions that are among the leading drivers of maternal mortality: fewer than 8 hours sedentary, at least 7 hours of light physical activity, around 22 minutes of moderate activity, and nearly 9 hours of sleep. Women who hit 4+ hours of light activity daily cut their risk from 30% to 15%.
The researchers were surprised that longer bouts of intense exercise added no meaningful benefit beyond this baseline. The bar isn’t high, and reducing sedentary time is where most of the risk reduction lives. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy also more than double a woman’s long-term risk of cardiovascular disease, meaning the stakes stretch well past the delivery room.
You don’t have to run a marathon pregnant. You just have to sit less. The study says the rest follows.
LAW & POLICY
Pfizer Just Agreed to Settle 5,500 Brain Tumor Lawsuits. Women Had No Warning.
For decades, Pfizer sold a birth control shot without warning women it could give them brain tumors. This week, that finally has a price tag.
A global settlement was tentatively reached on June 16 for the Depo-Provera MDL, over 5,500 lawsuits filed by women who developed meningioma brain tumors after using the injectable contraceptive. Settlement amounts have not been disclosed. The Daubert hearings that would have determined whether expert testimony linking Depo-Provera to meningioma can proceed to trial, scheduled for June 24–26, now hang in the balance as both sides work to finalize the deal.
The science behind these cases is some of the strongest in pharmaceutical litigation. A major BMJ study found women who used Depo-Provera for over a year were 5.6 times more likely to develop a meningioma. Canada and Europe added warnings about this risk years ago. The FDA added a meningioma warning to the US label only in December 2025. Every woman who used Depo-Provera before that date, and roughly 24.5% of all sexually active American women have, received no warning of any kind.
The FDA Is Reviewing Mifepristone. The Results Won’t Be Ready Until After the Midterms.
The FDA confirmed on June 5 that it is moving forward with a retrospective safety study of mifepristone, a review of hundreds of thousands of cases that could pave the way for the Trump administration to restrict how the drug is prescribed and distributed. Preliminary results could arrive as early as July. The full results are not expected before November’s midterm elections.
The timing is not coincidental. Mifepristone now accounts for nearly two-thirds of all US abortions and is used in miscarriage care across every state. The former FDA Commissioner was reportedly told to slow-walk the review until after the midterms, he resigned last month. The study was prompted not by new safety evidence but by a self-published, non-peer-reviewed paper from a Project 2025 sponsor that researchers have widely debunked. The drug has been used safely by over 7.5 million people in the US over 25 years.
The Louisiana district court has ordered the FDA to file a status report on the review by October 7, 2026, one month before Election Day. The Supreme Court’s May 14 stay keeps mifepristone accessible via telehealth for now, but the Fifth Circuit, which has already signaled it intends to reimpose in-person dispensing requirements, is waiting in the wings.
The safety review isn’t about safety. It’s about timing. And the midterms are in November.
ON THE FEED
The Health Data Revolution Forgot One Thing: What to Do With All the Data.
You wake up. Before you check the time, you check your sleep score. It’s 62. The day hasn’t started and you already feel like you’ve failed it.
The $90 billion global wearables market sold women on a promise: more data, more control, better health. What it delivered is something clinicians are calling orthosomnia, obsessive preoccupation with perfect sleep scores, and what Banner Health doctors are calling wearable-induced health anxiety. Consumer sleep trackers are only about 60% accurate compared to lab equipment. Oura’s own CEO has said it plainly: “People don’t want the data. They want the insight.” That’s not a product vision. That’s a confession.
Women were told wearables would give them the health agency the medical system denied them. Many are now living inside an Excel spreadsheet, without a clinician in sight to explain what any of it means.
The UK Is Banning Teens From Social Media. Women’s Health Creators Have a Different Problem With That.
On June 15, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a sweeping ban on social media for under-16s, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, and X, effective spring 2027. More than 90% of respondents to the government’s consultation supported it. Parents relieved. Teens furious. Platforms warned that it would push children somewhere darker.
Women’s health creators had a different concern. The tools being built to enforce the ban are the same tools that have been misidentifying medically accurate content about periods, menopause, and fertility as adult material for years. Ninety-five percent of women’s health creators surveyed by CensHERship reported censorship on these platforms in the past year. The UK government was formally told this in a parliamentary debate in May. Its response: existing legislation is sufficient.
The platforms being handed new enforcement infrastructure are the same ones that made women spell “vgna” to avoid being taken down.