Medical Studies do not take into account women even now; study shows

New Delhi, March 10,2014 : Two decades after the passage of National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act requiring women and ethnic minorities be included in government-funded medical trials, a new study by the Connors Center for Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and the Jacobs Institute of Womens Health at George Washington University in Washington shows that scientists continue to neglect gender in medical research putting in danger womens health. Despite the progress made in health care research, research on women’s health and gender differences lag far behind the research on men’s health care.

Women were routinely not included in clinical trials and even if they were, sex differences that were detected were largely unreported. This meant that the science that led to diagnosis and treatment of disease was predicated predominantly on male physiology. While women are now more routinely included in clinical trials and an entire field of womens health has emerged, there are still enormous gaps in the scientific process as it relates to women. There needs to be greater focus on how the hormonal and biological differences between men and women are researched and documented to find out why diseases and treatments affect the sexes differently.

The study focused on the disparities in research, diagnosis, treatments and outcomes between men and women for heart disease, lung cancer, depression and Alzheimer’s. More women than men die of cardiovascular disease; research still lags on understanding how treatments for heart disease affect the sexes differently, because only one-third of cardiovascular clinical trial subjects are female. Plaque that causes heart disease is more diffusely deposited in womens arteries, so the cardiac catheterization, which shoots dye into the arteries, may be inadequate for women. Female non-smokers are three times more likely than nonsmoking men to get lung cancer, current research often fails to stratify data based on gender-specific factors. Women are also more likely to suffer depression than men, but less than 45 percent of animal studies to better understand anxiety and depression use female lab animals. A womans overall lifetime risk of developing Alzheimers disease is almost twice that of a man, and it has been thought that this is simply because women live longer. However, hormones may play a role.

However, a lot of researchers don’t want to do studies on women of childbearing age due to their monthly hormonal fluctuations. To include women and female animals in adequate numbers, researchers need to increase the sample sizes of their studies, which takes more funding, so money can be a barrier to more gender-aware research. Pregnancy and safety to unborn children are other concerns too. To address research disparities, it is recommended that government agencies, drug manufacturers, hospital review boards that approve studies and medical journal editors institute substantial changes to make women’s health a research priority. IGMPI