When Professor Gita Mishra heard she would be receiving an AO, her first thoughts were of her parents.
“I wish my parents were alive. They both passed away in 2020 and 2021… I wish they were here to enjoy and know their daughter’s work has been recognised at a very high level,” Professor Mishra says. “[An AO] is something you don’t imagine or expect – it’s still sinking in, is this really true!?”
Coming from a statistics background, Professor Gita Mishra is the first Professor of Life Course Epidemiology at the University of Queensland’s School of Public Health.
She is best known as the Director of the landmark Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health (ALSWH), which since 1996, has gathered data from more than 57,000 women across four age groups.
A historically under researched field, this study was the first to chart the prevalence of endometriosis in Australia, discovering that a staggering one in seven women will have been diagnosed with the condition by the time they turn 50.
“It’s saying that about 14 percent of women in Australia [will be] diagnosed with endometriosis. So that’s a big issue…it’s quite a large number, as high as the prevalence of diabetes and other chronic conditions, and yet we don’t know a lot about the disease,” Professor Mishra says. “That was a really ‘wow’ [moment], I couldn’t believe the prevalence.”
Her research has been a gamechanger in national policy and perception of women’s health, informing Australia’s current National Women’s Health Strategy and National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children as well as countless state government strategies.
As one of the first research teams to look at women’s health longitudinally, her work has also encouraged a more holistic understanding of women’s life cycles, and greater respect for women’s right to an adequate quality of life.
“When people think about women’s health, it’s always about pregnancy or maternal health,” says Professor Mishra on her approach. “What we’re trying to do is to show that women’s health is beyond reproduction… Our life doesn’t finish when we finish producing. It goes on…life carries on after menopause as well. So, I take a life course perspective.”
Most pertinently, Professor Gita Mishra and her team have discovered links between reproductive health and the eventual onset of chronic conditions – women’s risk of stroke increases with every stillbirth or miscarriage they have, and girls with an early menarche are more likely to have gestational diabetes.
“What I really want to get people to be thinking about is the big picture, and not a siloed view of a condition or chronic disease, because they’re all interrelated,” she says.
Though these are frightening findings which expose just how little we know about women’s health, Professor Mishra remains optimistic.
“I’m a person that likes to think that the glass is half full… think about this as a crystal ball to your future health,” she says of her findings. “Knowledge should empower us to do something… The disease is not going to go away, but it might when you take all the preventative measures before you get to that stage. We can turn it around to suit us, I think.”
Equally, she believes despite what can feel like slow progress, national policymaking on women’s health is heading in the right direction.
“We’ve been quite fortunate because the ALSWH is being funded by the Department of Health; in the 30 years history of the study, it has been bipartisan,” she notes. “We’ve been collecting data as we go… it has been proactive and we’re able to put it in a report form to the government about where the issues are. We’re the first country to have a national action plan for endometriosis. So, I think in some areas, Australia is definitely leading the way.”
Professor Mishra’s efforts have been noticed internationally; she is a board member of the European Menopause and Andropause Society and has sat on numerous committees for the UK’s Medical Research Council.
Since 2012, she has led the foremost international resource on women’s health, the International collaboration for a Life course Approach to reproductive health and Chronic disease Events (InterLACE).
The author of over 500 publications, she is ranked in the top 1 percent of most cited scientists in the field of General Social Sciences according to Essential Science Indicators.
Moving forward, Professor Gita Mishra hopes to understand more about the biological mechanisms contributing to reproductive health and collect more data on multicultural women.
“There’s has been a lot of migration to Australia from people from South and Southeast Asia. From the female reproductive aspects, we don’t have a good representation [of] their needs and that is something that we are, going forward and in partnership, understanding,” she says.
Her pioneering findings are testament to the fact that women’s health can’t afford to be ignored, and that we can’t afford to be passive spectators of our wellbeing.
“Whatever you do, don’t sweep these results under the carpet, take it in as something that will empower us, and go forward.”
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