Are medications sexist?

Erving Zucker and his colleagues at University of California Berkeley conducted research in more than 5,000 publications and focused on 86 medications on the U.S. market administered to men and women. At equivalent doses, 76 of them had a higher concentration in women’s blood than in men’s blood, because their metabolism differs, leading to an overdose in women.

The group of researches even found a study showing that a blood thinner medication stayed in women’s blood up to 48 hours, compared to only two hours in men’s blood. This may explain why nearly twice as many women had higher rates of adverse drug reactions than men. Overall, they had adverse reactions twice as often as men. Many drugs are still administered to men and women at the same dose, regardless of their weight and sex, based on the findings of clinical trials conducted in the past mainly on male patients.

Zucker highlighted the fact that for decades, women were excluded from clinical trials based on a principle that’s now recognized as unfounded: that their hormonal fluctuations made them difficult to study. Until the early 1990s, women of childbearing age were also excluded because of medical concerns about risks to the fetus. Today, clinical trials for new drugs include both men and women, but differences in metabolism between the sexes are sometimes overlooked.

A key part of Women’s Cardiovascular Healthcare Foundation’s work is to alert researchers and medical staff about the importance of taking into account the specificities of women’s metabolism when new treatments are developed as well as evaluating any side effects of prescribed treatments during follow-up appointments.

https://bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13293-020-00308-5