“When was your last period?”

For anyone who menstruates, this is a routine question during any visit to your doctor.

Health care providers generally ask this to determine whether their patient is concerned about a menstrual problem, or a possible pregnancy, or whether menopause is approaching or has occurred.

But rarely is the question discussed in the context of exploring menstrual experience as a “vital sign of health”...

Racism steals time from people’s lives – possibly because of the space it occupies in the mind. In a new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open, our team showed that the toll of racism on the brain was linked to advanced aging^[1], observed on a cellular level.

Black women who were more frequently exposed to racism showed stronger connections in brain networks involved with rumination and vigilance. We found...