Why should we care about sex differences? Shouldn't we treat men and women the same?
If we're talking about respect, of course! If we're talking about biology, drug dosing, etc...NO
If we're talking about respect, of course! If we're talking about biology, drug dosing, etc...NO
Historically, medicine has treated women as simply "more variable males" and most studies used (white, upper class) men, and assumed the results could be applied to women. There were also concerns about allowing women of child-bearing age to participate in studies
Women weren't regularly included in clinical trials in the US until the NIH Revitalization Act was passed in 1993!! This has lead to less knowledge about how medications may affect women differently, and as a result, compromised the quality of healthcare they receive.
An example of this is the sleeping pill Ambien. It is metabolized differently in women, resulting in the FDA having to reduce the dosages for women. well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/the…
This extends beyond healthcare too. Crash test dummies were standardized to average male bodies, which resulted in cars being more dangerous for women and children washingtonpost.com/local/traffica…
We're gotten better about including women in clinical research, but basic science and translational research (that informs clinical studies) still lagged behind. It wasn't until 2014 that the NIH mandated that sex needed to be considered as a biological variable
In considering sex as a biological variable, studies need to either include male and female animals or justify why they only use males or females.
This is a huge deal for pain research--chronic pain conditions are more common in women, but a 2005 review found 79% of preclinical pain studies only used male animals! ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16098670
