When gender differences are ignored in health studies, it’s women who pay the price

[marvin100]

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-xx-factor/

Unfortunately for women, the necessity of taking account of biological sex differences in early-stage pharmaceutical research has routinely been neglected, avoided, and rationalized away.

(This article is a mess of bad framing and ideological bias, but the data is eye-opening)

[BunsenBurner]

Who cares… The FDA will be de-funded very, very soon. Brace for voodoo medicine, everyone!

(It is so easy to blame the FDA for any drug failure or previously unknown side effect)

[greenwitch]

I consider that my mother died from medical sexism. She had colon cancer, probably undiagnosed for 10 years or so. My Dad had had 2 colonoscopies by her age but it was deemed not needed for women back then.

I thought about this last summer when H’s doctor ordered a stress test for him but my doctor did not order one for me (and I’m a little bit older). He has no family history of heart disease and I do. Oh yes, I will be mentioning this at my next check up!

[ucbalumnus]

@greenwitch

I thought about this last summer when H’s doctor ordered a stress test for him but my doctor did not order one for me (and I’m a little bit older). He has no family history of heart disease and I do. Oh yes, I will be mentioning this at my next check up!

You may want to consider the USPSTF recommendations on ECG testing at rest or exercising (though they are in the process of being revised):

https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/Page/Document/UpdateSummaryFinal/coronary-heart-disease-screening-with-electrocardiography

Your doctor and your husband’s doctor may not necessarily have the same tendency to order tests, independent of the gender of the patient.

[dietz199]

This goes way back http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2010/07/drug_problem.html

In 1977, partly in response to these tragedies, the FDA banned women who could become pregnant from participating in early-stage clinical trials. In practice, the ban ended up applying not just to women who were likely to conceive, but also women who were not sexually active, who used contraception, or who were homosexual. The law was upheld until 1993, when concerns arose that it left the health of women in the dark and that it implied “a lack of respect for their autonomy and decision-making capacity,” as one New England Journal of Medicine report noted. Then Congress passed the 1993 National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act, which required that all NIH-funded Phase 3 clinical trials include women unless exclusion was deemed appropriate, such as with trials testing potential drugs for prostate cancer or erectile dysfunction. But the pro-male tendency lingered (and has never been addressed by the FDA, which handles industry-funded trials), and many women who have since been included in trials have been required to ensure they will not get pregnant: A 2000 study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology reported that contraception or sterility was required in 41.7 percent of 410 study protocols analyzed from 1994 to 1997.

And between then and now we’ve introduced a socio=political problem. How can we admit the genders/sexes are so very different at a cellular level and yet continue to push policy that ‘there are no differences and it must all be equal’.

Seem’s we’ve painted ourselves into the proverbial corner.

[marvin100]

The simple answer to that is that biological differences != behavioral differences. Longer answers would include the other many biological differences between groups of people and even individuals.

[greenwitch]

I remember when we had a new NIH chief, Bernadine Healy?, and she was supposed to help direct research to include women more. Wasn’t that back in the 90s?

OK, I checked my own facts, lol. It was the 90’s, and she died at age 67 of complications from brain cancer. From her obituary;

Healy, who lived in a suburb of Cleveland, died Saturday at her home. She served as NIH director from April 1991 through June 1993, primarily under President George H.W. Bush.
During her tenure, she struggled against bureaucratic infighting within the agency and battled with some members of Congress over cooperation with oversight inquiries, according to The New York Times.
Healy also launched the NIH’s Women’s Health Initiative, a $500 million project to study the causes, prevention, and cures of diseases affecting women.

[TatinG]

Of course, contraception or sterility was required for women participating in clinical drug studies. While the woman can sign consent forms admitting that she’s been warned about the hazards of the drug she’s testing, the fetus (should it live) has not signed those forms and can sue for damage that the drug caused him/her. Lawsuits for birth defects are multi-million dollar suits. Some of the damage can be multi-generational since a woman is carrying all the eggs she will ever have while men continue to produce ‘fresh’ sperm. The DES lawsuits involved women whose grandmothers had taken the drugs.

[dietz199]

Add this complication to the equation…

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pregnancy-causes-lasting-changes-in-a-womans-brain/

So, the pre and post pregnancy physical organism is different.

And yes, I also thought gender was a fluid and mainly social construct. And WHO agrees…

http://www.who.int/gender-equity-rights/understanding/gender-definition/en/

Maybe if we all just self identify as male the problem will go away.

[DonnaL]

Gender roles, gender expression, etc. – all certainly fluid and primarily a social construct, except of course for inherent biological differences such as those relating to pregnancy and childbirth. Gender identity (not even mentioned at the WHO link)? Not so much a social construct, as a large amount of research has shown in the last decade or so.

[TooOld4School]

The relevant question is whether differentiated M/F studies are occurring today. I am pretty skeptical of current gender research because of the current politically charged atmosphere, it is very hard to discern anything from the media which always has an agenda, or from researchers mostly looking for more grants.

[marvin100]

@TooOld4School

I am pretty skeptical of current gender research because of the current politically charged atmosphere, it is very hard to discern anything from the media which always has an agenda, or from researchers mostly looking for more grants.

This is also a bit of a derail, but–while I sympathize with your skepticism!–the danger of this point of view is that when you throw out literally all other sources of information, all your left with is your (almost inevitably self-serving) preconceptions and assumptions. And while researchers of course need funding, peer-reviewed research is still the most reliable approach to learning new things that our species has yet devised.

[HImom]

I believe many research projects are still being designed to test male mice only. Hopefully before FFA approves, there will be adequate studies of both genders.