HEALTH Sick gen gap
For years, drug tr research ignored initiative is workin devastating – and bias, reports
When scientists wanted to learn more about healthy ageing, they spent 20 years studying tens of thousands of people, while a series of major drug trials for heart disease included 35,000 patients. Not one of them was a woman.
This men-only focus has always been an issue and remains prevalent in every aspect of medical research.
For centuries, textbooks have concentrated on the male anatomy, and the clinical trials needed to develop new medicines either ignore female biology or relegate its relevance.
From autism and diabetes to osteoporosis and oncology, women and girls have been short-changed in their health prospects.
They have been left in jeopardy from drugs that are ineffective or potentially dangerous because their impact on women has not been fully examined. It is a devastating and fatal bias.
A study by the British Heart Foundation estimates that over a decade, 8,243 women lost their lives needlessly because of poor clinical and public awareness that a heart attack can have very different symptoms between the sexes.
Disturbingly, government statistics reveal that women spend more than 25 per cent of their lives in ill health and disability compared to around 20 per cent for men. And in recent years, life expectancy for women has fallen.
Now, in a landmark undertaking, the UK’S major research funders – representing more than 150 charities with a combined annual budget of more than £4billion – have committed to support research projects only if they deal with men and women fairly.
Every year, one million people in Britain take part in around 10,000 potentially life-changing research programmes. These will now have to consider the impact on women as well as men in order to receive funding.
“This support for change is long overdue but very welcome as women have been disadvantaged for decades,” says Dr Kate Womersley, Research Fellow at The George Institute for Global Health and Imperial College London. The university co-founded the Message project for change after discovering no UK research funder had a policy to require the inclusion of women when they awarded grants.
“Research has mainly been done on male cells, male animals and male participants. More than five times the number of male cells and animals than female are used in preclinical research in animals and more than 70 per cent of participants in early stage clinical trials are white men.
“That means we know less about women, about their health, how they experience disease and treatments, what doses will be effective and what side effects they will experience.
“The UK is lagging behind other nations and there are huge gaps to close, but this is an important moment to improve the opportunities for women to live healthy lives and not be disadvantaged.”
Women encounter sub-standard treatment at all points of their medical journey, from clinicians not recognising symptoms and delayed diagnoses to inappropriate medication plans influenced by historic male bias.
Dr Sonya Babu-narayan, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, says: “We have highlighted immense and deep-rooted gender inequalities in clinical research. It goes beyond biology and is driven by historic and systemic biases in our societies that seep into not only scientific but