Reported today on The Guardian For the full article visit:
Gender health gap: Australian medical research ignoring drugs' side effects in women
Clinical trials often failing to report results for sex and gender, despite the fact many drugs cause adverse effects in women
Women are being ignored in medical trials and reports, according to a report which calls for more Australian medical research to include gender-specific data.
Failing to account for the different effects a drug may have on men and women compromises quality of care for women, according to the report published in the Medical Journal of Australia on Monday.
"Historically and consistently across a broad range of health domains, data have been collected from men and generalised to women," the authors of Sex and Gender in Health Research: Updating Policy to Reflect Evidence wrote.
The result is a gender bias in medicine, leading to poorer outcomes for women across illnesses common in both men and women and a lack of knowledge on conditions that mainly affect women.
"Failure to appreciate the differences between and across the sex and gender spectrum risks compromising the quality of care and increasing costs due to inappropriate allocation of resources," the authors write.
Co-author and neurologist Dr Cheryl Carcel said the federal government needed to ensure sex and gender differences were included in future research.
Clinical trials "quite often" don't report specific results for males and females, according to Carcel. Drugs which may be effective for both men and women could cause worse side effects in women.
Of the 10 prescription drugs taken off the market by the US Food and Drug Administration between 1997 and 2000 due to severe adverse effects, eight caused greater health risks in women. A 2018 study found this was
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