Women's health is often put at risk when medical researchers ignore gender their studies and focus in primarily male patients.
A report released today by Connors Center for Womenâs Health at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and the Jacobs Institute of Womenâs Health at George Washington University in Washington expressed that many medical studies include both genders in their results but use male subjects, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
"We've got to do the work and change the way science is done and translated to clinical care," Paula Johnson, executive director of the Connors Center, told Bloomberg. "Until we do that, we are putting women's health at risk."
Medical researchers are still unsure how heart disease (one of the leading killers of U.S. women) affects males and females differently, Boston.com reported.
Women who are non-smokers are almost three times more likely than male smokers to get lung cancer, but enroll in fewer lung cancer studies.
Twice as many women struggle with depression than men, but about 45 percent of animal studies on the subject use male subjects.
"Women are now routinely included in clinical trials, but we are far from achieving equity in biomedical research," report leader Doctor Paula Johnson, executive director of the Brigham's Connors Center for Women's Health and Gender Biology, told boston.com.
Including women in medical trials would not come with additional costs.
"For studies that already include women and female animals, reporting data by sex is critically important and that's not routinely done," Johnson told Bloomberg. "We're not getting the value for our added research dollars."
The U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does address the problem when previously undocumented gender differences are suspected.
"We'll continue to advocate for the inclusion of women in clinical trials and for analyses of how their bodies process medications," Sandra Kweder, the FDA's deputy director of the Office of New Drugs, told Bloomberg.
