Table of contents:
- The side effects of the drug on a woman's body were known too late
- Women's bodies metabolize drugs more slowly than men
- The female reproductive system also affects the side effects of drugs
- What is the impact on women's health?
If you have a cold or you sprained your leg, whether you are a woman or a man, you will definitely undergo the same tests and be given the same medication by a doctor or pharmacist, regardless of gender. But did you know that there are side effects of drugs that often only affect women?
The side effects of the drug on a woman's body were known too late
A study shows that 80% of drugs that are withdrawn from the market are due to side effects in women. Why were these drug side effects in women only discovered after the drug had already been released to the market?
Did you know that it takes a long time for drugs to be released on the market? Starting from just an idea, then testing it on cells in the laboratory, in animal studies, and through to clinical testing in humans, and finally going through a regulatory approval procedure, until it's finally available for doctors to treat you. So, why are they late in discovering side effects that only occur in one gender? What the heck is this?
Institute of Medicine says that every cell has a sex. As it turns out, the cells used in the laboratory to test drugs are male cells. The animals used in animal studies are also male, and the clinical trials of drugs that are conducted are mostly limited to men, so the results of clinical drug trials are mostly results based on reactions in the male body.
Women's bodies metabolize drugs more slowly than men
Why are men the basis for medical research? Let's look at an example of a study in men with the sleeping pill Ambien.
Ambien was sold on the market more than 20 years ago, and hundreds of millions of prescriptions have been written, especially for women because women experience more sleep problems than men. However, right in the year preceding this, the FDA recommended halving the dosage for women, because they had just realized that women metabolize this drug at a slower rate than men. This makes women wake up in the morning with a lot of this active drug residue in their system.
And then, women feel sleepy and not fresh enough to drive, so they are more at risk of being involved in accidents.
The female reproductive system also affects the side effects of drugs
World War II changed many things, and one of them was the need to protect people from the threat of becoming victims of unauthorized medical research. So a set of rules was drawn up, and one of them was the desire to protect women of childbearing age from being involved in any medical research.
It put it simply like this: What if something happened to the fertility of the women during the study? Who will be responsible for this? Therefore, researchers at that time tended to feel safer using male respondents in research.
This is good news for researchers, because the male body does not experience the same continuous changes in hormone levels as the female body, which can create confusion over the data. There is a general assumption that men and women are the same in every way, even though the reproductive organs and sex hormones are different. So, it was decided that medical research was carried out on men, and the results were then used by women. It is much simpler and cheaper.
What is the impact on women's health?
Women's health means reproduction: pregnancy, uterus, breasts, ovaries. These times are referred to as "bikini medicine, " and this lasted until around the 1980s, when this concept was questioned by the medical community and the health policymaking community. Only then did they learn that by excluding women in all medical research studies, they were actually putting women at risk, and that apart from reproductive problems, almost nothing else was known about the primary needs of female patients.
Hello Health Group does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
