A critical new report from Boston researchers chides the federal government and research community for routinely overlooking the importance of gender differences in medical studies — ultimately leaving women’s health to chance.
Studies about diseases and drugs typically include more male than female subjects, or don’t bother to break down results by gender, the report states. The male-dominated nature of research has meant even lab mice are typically male — or their sex is not reported.
“If medical research is skewed to male physiology, women are at risk for incorrect diagnoses and inadequate treatment recommendations and missed opportunities for prevention,” said Jill Goldstein, director of research at the Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which issued the report today.
Full inclusion of women is “still the exception, not the norm,” two decades after a landmark federal law was supposed to remedy the problem, said Dr. Paula Johnson, chief of women’s health at Brigham and an author of the report.
Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women in the U.S., but only one-third of cardiovascular clinical trial subjects are women and less than one-third of the trials that include women report outcomes by sex, Johnson said.
“At every level of research … women have been under-represented,” agreed Julie Palmer of Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center, which was not involved in the study.
The long-standing problem, women’s health experts say, stems from when researchers thought men and women were the same except for their reproductive systems. Now studies find even aspirin and sleeping pills have different effects on men and women.
“The history of women’s health has been around reproduction,” Goldstein said. “And of course there are differences in reproduction. But it is much broader than that.”
The report will be discussed at a conference in Boston today.
