UIAA expands its commitment to female climbers and mountaineers

Nearly 50 years ago, the Japanese climber Junko Tabei was celebrated as the first woman to summit the highest mountain of the world. But well before her time, and in increasing numbers since, women depart on high altitude adventures. They climb, they hike, they trek – and yet little scientific knowledge has been established regarding women’s health at high altitude. To help highlight this problem members of the UIAA Medical Commission in team with external experts recently published a set of scientific reviews in the High Altitude Medicine & Biology journal. This series attempts to summarise what is known of women’s health at high altitude to date and is the result of 3 years dedicated research and teamwork.

Women’s high-altitude health: FAQ 

To make this newly published scientific information accessible to the climbing community (and anyone else who wants to know) we have translated the scientific language to plain English, and published it in the form of highly informative but easy-to-read Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQs). The FAQs about women’s health at high altitude include questions such as “What do women need to know about contraception at high altitude?” to “Is it safe for pregnant women to go mountaineering at high altitude?”. We hope to expand the FAQ idea to other topics in the near future.

Click here to visit the new FAQ page!

Next UIAA Session on Women Going to Altitude

The UIAA will host a 2.5-hour session on “Women Going to Altitude” at the upcoming 8th World Congress on Mountain & Wilderness Medicine jointly organised by the International Society of Mountain Medicine (ISMM) and the Wilderness Mountain Society (WMS), to be held from 29 July – 1 August 2024 in Snowbird, Utah, USA,. The session will be co-chaired by Urs Hefti, UIAA Medical Commission president and ISMM president Monika Brodmann Maeder and will conclude the three year women’s health at high altitude project.

An impressive line-up of speakers and topics is to captivate conference attendees:

• Bili Bierling, Mountaineering journalist and contributor to the Himalayan Database – It’s high time for women: how female climbers have performed in the Himalaya from the first ascents to the present day
• Mia Derstine, MD, Wilderness Medicine Fellowship trained Emergency Medicine Physician – AMS/HACE and Women – what we need to know
• Jacqueline Pichler Hefti, MD, Pneumologist, Sports Medicine Specialist, Swiss Sportclinic – Does sex make a difference to HAPE susceptibility and performance?
• Alison Rosier, UIAA Medical Commission & Psychologist- Can psychology help explain sex differences in mountain medicine?
• Linda E Keyes, MD, University of Colorado, Adjunct Associate Professor- Cycle Control and Contraception at Altitude and Pregnancy and Mountain Travel
• George Rodway, PhD, UIAA Medical Commission- UIAA MedCom Recommendations: addressing the (lay) climbing community

The topic of women at altitude was also the feature of episode #4 of the UIAA podcast Mountain Voices. Listen here:

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