ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL APPROACH TO DRUG PRESCRIPTION IS FAILING WOMEN

Women are more likely than men to suffer adverse side effects of medications because drug dosages are based on clinical trials conducted on men, a study from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago suggests.

The researchers analysed data from several thousand medical journals and found clear evidence that women were being overprescribed for 86 different medications approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), including antidepressants, cardiovascular and anti-seizure drugs and analgesics, among others.

In more than 90 per cent of cases, women experienced worse side effects, such as nausea, headache, seizures, depression, cognitive deficits, hallucinations, agitation and cardiac anomalies, and were found to experience adverse reactions nearly twice as often as men.