Dr. Vivian Pinn, Lynchburg native, speaks a women’s health dinner

By Cynthia Pegram

Published: May 12, 2008

When Dr. Vivian Pinn was tapped to be the first director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health for the National Institutes of Health, she thought she’d be there a few years.

“That was 27 years ago, and I’m still amazed,” Pinn said, speaking Monday to a Lynchburg Academy of Medicine dinner meeting.

Yet, her habit of really speaking her mind, has not waned, but “I’ve learned to be more diplomatic,” she said.

Accepting the job, “changed my calling, changed my life,” Pinn said.

The Lynchburg native and valedictorian of Dunbar High School ’58, is a graduate of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and holds her medical degree from the University of Virginia. Hers is a career of steady successes and many firsts, including that of being the first woman chairman of the department of Pathology at Howard University College of Medicine.

The NIH office she leads was born, in part, by the efforts of advocates for women’s health, as well as by science.

Until the 1990s, most medical research was done on men, then applied to women as though they were the same, but that view is no longer seen as correct, Pinn said.

That’s a big difference from the 1980s when women’s medicine was seen in terms of reproductive medicine only, and not life-span issues, she said.

A growing body of research is finding differences even in the genetic makeup of cells, “basic biological differences in organ systems and tissues.”

The results of research on women’s health find, for example, that pain syndromes play out differently in men and women. She pointed to the now well-recognized findings that heart attack presents differently in women than in men.

She was appointed to lead the new office in 1991.

Today, one of the roles the Office on Research on Women’s Health — enacted as law by Congress — is to assure that all 27 of the federal National Institutes of Health include research on women.

But despite the increased knowledge resulting from expanding research, the U.S. came in 32nd place in life expectancy in a recent study done by the World Health Organization (WHO), Pinn said. And in several areas in the U.S. the life expectancy actually declined.

Obesity, smoking, and HIV-AIDS are factors in that, she said.

And health questions remain — like the cause of a surge in strokes in women between ages 30 and 64; why fewer women are getting mammograms; what are the reasons why women are less likely than men to keep cholesterol under control; and why is there a correlation between a drop in the use of hormone treatments in women and decline in the numbers of breast cancer cases?

Pinn noted the HPV vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer, seemed like an ideal breakthrough, a vaccine that protects against the transmission of an STD (sexually transmitted disease), yet it has created major controversy.

And questions still need to be answered — should it be used for older adult women as well as young women? Should it be used for men?

Pinn returns today to Washington to lead the NIH efforts for Women’s Health Week.