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Post by Megan Mikesell on Sept 20, 2016 17:12:59 GMT
Obviously males and females are very different; however, in medicine and research they are not always treated as such. Researchers and doctors have made a lot of progress in this area, but there is still a ways to go. In the past pharmaceuticals would only be tested on one sex and diagnostic criteria would be based on the presentation of only males for example. It is important to note that males and females react differently to certain medications and present with diseases differently. Just as medicine is learning to take these difference into account, so should public health. Not only when looking at the life expectancy disparity, but also behavioral differences so we can target programs in order to have the greatest impact.
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Post by Lex Hurley on Oct 7, 2016 19:14:11 GMT
Megan, after reading your post, I was inclined to do a little reading on the issue of women's inclusion into medical & pharmacological research and already learned quite a bit. Following the thalomide nightmare in the 50s-60s where women who took thalomide to help with morning sickness gave birth to infants with phocomelia (indelicately referred to as "flipper babies") ((*and actually it wasn't even thalomide that caused the birth defects, but a stabilising/preservative substance that was mixed in with the liquid solution to help with shelf-life*)), researchers expressed great fears at causing any more unintentional damage to developing fetuses and made it an unspoken 'policy' not to involve any women of childbearing age. it wasn't until the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 "mandated NIH-funded trials have sample-sizes adequate to support a 'valid analysis' of gender and racial subgroup effects" 1 that this trend began to wane. However the same mindset still persisted in researchers for in following years, the mandate was contested later when HIV+ women were excluded from participating in drug trials of new antiretroviral therapies for the dangers that the untested drug could hold for developing/future fetuses. Arguing that the potential benefits from ART treatment outweighed the potential future risks to women with an (at that time) fatal disease, the FDA finally secured the participation of premenopausal women in pharmaceutical studies "under certain circumstances". 1 Change in these arenas is slow, but it is still coming even today. Hopefully with public health being such a newly-popularized and quickly-growing field, we will be able to catch up with the times and make beneficial change for full and equal inclusion of all peoples faster.
1) Berlin JA, Ellenberg SS. 2009. Inclusion of women in clinical trials. BMC Medicine. 7(56). Retrieved online October 7, 2016 from bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-7-56. |
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