First Lady Jill Biden, actress Halle Berry to visit Chicago’s UIC to discuss women’s health

CHICAGO (CBS) — First Lady Jill Biden was in Chicago on Thursday to talk about the importance of women’s health research.

She made a stop at the University of Illinois Chicago to highlight the importance of more research on menopause and women’s health. It’s part of a White House initiative on women’s health research that launched back in November.

Biden said the initiative, “will make sure that women are not just an afterthought, but a first thought.”

She said she decided to come to UIC because the university has made significant strides in research on menopause.

Actress Halle Berry and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle joined Biden for the event.  

Dr. Pauline Maki was also part of the event. She told CBS 2 that menopause is having a moment with women demanding answers about their health and how it’s affecting their quality of life in later years.

“When we think about menopause, we usually think about hot flashes as the key symptom, but there are other symptoms that affect certain women,” she said. “It’s important to realize that some women sail through menopause with no problem at all, but a lot of women have problems with something called brain fog, so they can’t concentrate as well, they feel that their memory is not functioning as well as it could be. It’s changing levels of estrogen.”

Maki demonstrated a hot flash monitor and explained how they disturb sleep. She said the worse hot flashes women have, the harder it is to remember words. On average, Black women experience hot flashes for 10 years.

“The monitor picks up on this,” Maki said during the demonstration. “So, do you see these black spikes here? There are 37 of these black spikes. This woman had 37 hot flashes in one day.”

Maki said the record of hot flashes she’s seen in one day is 52. She argued for the importance of more research on menopause and how it affects the quality of life for women.