Medical research on surgery ignores women’s health problems

When surgical specialists at Northwestern Medicine took a close look at how research into surgical issues takes women’s special needs into consideration, they were taken aback: The special needs of women are hardly ever considered.

The review of surgical studies demonstrates that surgical researchers rarely even use female lab animals or even cells from females in their papers that appear in medical journals.

The Northwestern scientists were alarmed because a huge amount of medical evidence proves that sex differences often play a significant part in the outcomes of medical research.

“Women make up half the population, but in surgical literature, 80 percent of the studies only use males,” says researcher Melina R. Kibbe, M.D., a vascular surgeon at Northwestern Medicine.

In response to this study, editors at five major surgical journals (whose journals were included in the review) have said they will now require researchers submitting studies to declare the sex of animals and cells used in their research. If a submitted study uses only one sex, that choice will need to be justified.

“We need to do better and provide basic research on both sexes to ultimately improve treatments for male and female patients,” says Kibbe.

Studies that entail both males and females have shown that the two sexes metabolize drugs differently and process other substances and nutrients in varying ways. That is one factor that causes men and women to experience significant differences in the ways they develop illnesses and respond to treatment.

“Requiring the sex of animals and cells is a very small thing to ask of authors,” Kibbe says. “It should be a requirement of all medical journals.”

 

 

Carl Lowe

By Carl Lowe

has written about health, fitness and nutrition for a wide range of publications including Prevention Magazine, Self Magazine and Time-Life Books. The author of more than a dozen books, he has been gluten-free since 2007.

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