Recently, a lot of people have talked about how menopause could be a market gap that companies could fill to improve women’s health in a big way.
Drew Barrymore and Naomi Watts are two famous women who have talked about their own experiences with menopause and even pushed goods that can help. Of course, there aren’t many goods on the market for menopause to begin with. This is a hole that businesses could fill.
A new McKinsey study says that menopause has the most unmet needs and “enormous potential for innovative treatments.” It thinks the market could be worth as much as $350b.
When a woman stops having her period for at least twelve months in a row, she has reached menopause. Some women get this earlier or later than age 51, but most women get it around age 51. A woman may also have menopause signs years before she actually goes through it.
Anxiety, weight gain, hot flashes, vaginal dryness, mood swings, and changes in the skin are some of the signs a woman might have. A lot of these can be helped by medicines that balance hormones.
Years ago, hormone therapy was a popular way to treat many health problems, but then it was linked to breast cancer and heart disease. But there are still some hormone treatment drugs out there, like ones made by Pfizer.
Hormone-based products and items made to help with hot flashes, sleep, and other menopause symptoms are easy to find. There aren’t many options for these companies in the women’s health market, and there aren’t many choices for women going through menopause.
As the head of women’s health investment banking at Leerink Partners, Sasha Kelemen said, “Menopause is inevitable, like death and taxes. All women will go through this.” We just don’t have many public women’s health companies yet, but we hope that will change soon.
