MINI REVIEW article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Occupational Health and Safety
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1672503
This article is part of the Research TopicNavigating Environmental Hazards in the Workplace: Impacts and InterventionsView all 17 articles
A Gender-Integrated Biopsychosocial Model to Understand Cardiovascular Risk in Women Working under Environmental Hazards: The Case of Chronic Intermittent Hypoxia
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Physical Therapy, Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
- 2Universidad Finis Terrae Escuela de Kinesiologia, Santiago, Chile
- 3Centro de Economía y Políticas Sociales (CEAS), Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Artes, Universidad Mayor, Santiago, Chile
- 4Department of Cell Biology, Physiology and Immunology, Faculty of Biology, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
- 5Centro de Biomedicina, Laboratorio de Actividad Física, Ejercicio y Salud, Universidad Mayor, Huechuraba, Chile
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Women working in high-altitude (HA) mining environments are exposed to chronic intermittent hypoxia (CIH), a physiological stressor resulting from rotating work shifts between sea level and elevations typically above 3,000 meters above sea level (m.a.s.l). CIH involves repeated exposure to hypobaric hypoxia, imposing significant biological, psychological, and social demands. Despite increasing female participation in the mining sector, the long-term cardiovascular risks specific to women in these conditions remain poorly characterized. This mini-review introduces the Gender-Integrated Biopsychosocial Model (GBM). This conceptual framework integrates biological, psychological, and social dimensions to examine how sex hormones, emotional burden, and gendered occupational exposures shape cardiovascular and autonomic responses to CIH. Unlike existing models that primarily reflect male physiology, the GBM emphasizes the role of natural cycling hormonal fluctuations, contraceptive use, menopause, and structural inequities in modulating cardiovascular adaptation. By advancing a multidimensional, sex and gender informed perspective, the GBM offers a novel approach to understanding women's health in extreme environments and highlights the need for occupational and environmental physiology research to recognize gender not merely as a biological variable, but as a determinant of cardiovascular risk. This article contributes to the understanding of environmental and occupational hazards in extreme workplaces by introducing an integrative model that addresses gendered exposures and physiological responses under chronic intermittent hypoxia.
Keywords: high-altitude physiology, Risk factors, chronic intermittent hypoxia, Women's Health, Occupational Health
Received: 24 Jul 2025; Accepted: 29 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lang, Cazzuffi, Viscor and Soto-Sánchez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Johana Soto-Sánchez, Centro de Biomedicina, Laboratorio de Actividad Física, Ejercicio y Salud, Universidad Mayor, Huechuraba, Chile
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