Women not included enough in medical research: report

Women are not included enough in government-funded medical research, a new report says. A law 20 years ago was passed requiring that women are included in such studies, but this report says that that mandate is still being ignored.

"We still have a lot of bias embedded in academic medicine, and certainly it comes down to the people actually doing the studies," said Dr. Eve Higginbotham, vice dean for diversity and inclusion at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, according to the Doctors Lounge. "Women are still struggling to get to the highest levels of academic medicine. In many cases, women are not the primary drivers in many of these studies."

The new findings, scheduled to be released Monday at a national summit on women's health issues in Boston, notes that women are now more included in clinical trials and that other than reproductive health, there is now an entire new field dedicated to women, but that there are still gaps in scientific studies.

"Unless you study the populations that you're treating, you really don't know how that population is going to respond," said Dr. Lynn Gordon, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The latest statistics show the lack of research equality:

- Less than one-third of participants in cardiovascular clinical trial participants are women. What's more, just one-third of trials that include women report sex-specific outcomes.

- In animal studies regarding anxiety and depression, less than 45 percent use female animals.

- Researchers studying lung cancer often fail to include an analysis of data by sex or gender-specific factors. This is despite the fact that lung cancer behaves differently in women who don't smoke than in men who don't smoke.

Dr. Higginbotham thinks that this summit may be a step in exposing the inequality among scientific research.

"Change takes time, and it's going to take a number of factors to drive that," Higginbotham said. "Having the summit is a good first step in at least acknowledging the lack of progress that has been made and making people more aware."