Medical Research Continues To Ignore Women But At What Cost?

Whenever I have come across stories on conclusions for humans derived from animal studies, I have wondered about this aspect. This piece confirms my suspicions that research labs may be, unwittingly or not, short-changing women by ignoring gender differences in animal experiments — the backbone of most scientific studies.

As the author rightly says, it is only because of animal testing that there has been tremendous progress in the medical world — from vaccinations for deadly diseases like smallpox to understanding the benefits of chemotherapy. And yet, too many of these studies have failed to take into account what is technically known as ‘sexual dimorphism’ — the many traits from bone density to coloring to size that are different in the male and female sex of a species. Researchers of the Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute argue in their paper recently published in Nature that this is the kind of ‘scientific blind spot’ that could have (and has had) big consequences on the so-called results of such experiments. 

The researchers talk of a historical bias towards the male sex in scientific research; the norm is to ignore the other sex or analyse only the male sex and assume the results equally apply to the female. As the author adds, it might simply be that many scientists thought female bodies to be “too complex and variable” to be reliable test subjects. In other words, lazy research rules.

In fact, in 2013 FDA had to cut the recommended dosage of the sedative Ambien after it was discovered that the ‘normal’ dose was an overdose for women.

Since it is proven beyond doubt now that the female body operates differently from the male, owing to many factors (such as monthly hormone cycles, menstruation, childbirth etc.), and new evidence is increasingly pointing towards female brain patterns being different from that of men, it is time indeed to bring in some measure of sexual equality in scientific studies.