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Medical research has historically left women behind but new Australian research standards are trying to change this.
The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has released a new statement advocating for sex, gender, variations of sex characteristics and sexual orientation to be considered in health and medical research.
In other words, researchers will need to consider whether their research will include data from both men and women—rather than only men, as a lot of medical studies have done in the past.
The statement also requires researchers to consider whether the outcome measures are suitable for each sex and gender group, and how any differences will be measured.
The aim is to remove any existing sex-and-gender-based biases in medicine and close the systemic gender health gap.
What Is The Gender Health Gap?
The gender health gap or ‘healthcare gender bias’ refers to the well-documented health care disparities that exist between men and women, with women being more likely to not be taken seriously by medical professionals, receive less answers and more misdiagnosis.
A lot of this is due to the fact that medical researchers have, historically, not considered women, or the differences between men and women, in their research.
Trials also rarely include women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or even of ‘reproductive age.’ While the reasons for the disparity include safety concerns for women who are pregnant, there’s also a pervading belief that it’s difficult to include women because of the physiological and hormonal changes associated with our menstrual cycles.
However, these differences are exactly why we need to include more women in medical trials and research.
It’s these differences that could explain why women and men metabolise drugs differently, present different heart attack symptoms and experience different Covid-19 severities.
It’s also not just cisgender women who need more answers—the new standards place an emphasis on people with different sexual orientations, gender diversities and sex characteristics (intersex).
With these new standards, Australia follows the lead of Europe and North America, where policies to correct sex-and-gender-based bias’s in medical research have already been implemented.
What Happens Now?
While the statement outlines what the NHMRC wants to see in its research applications, its still up to researchers, universities, medical institutes and journals to make sure their practices are aligned with the standards.
Knowledge is power.
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