quote: The UCLA findings support the importance of gender-specific clinical trials. Most medication dosages for women have been based on clinical trials primarily conducted on men.
All the more reason for ensuring funding for studies of "men's" diseases and "women's" diseases . . . *goes back to reading the article*
quote: Humans and mice share 99 percent of their genes.
I knew it! We are really evolved from Mrs. Brisbey in the Rats of NIMH.
quote: But when we looked at the gene expression in these four tissues, more than half of the genes differed significantly between the sexes. The differences were not related to reproductive systems—they were visible across the board and related to primary functions of a wide variety of organs."
Well, that's a relief . . . I was thinking that "parts are determining factors" would crop as an argument again about sex superiority . . . Posts: 5609 | Registered: Jan 2003
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I never read the books-- because they showed the movie repeatedly at my daycare and I was always scared of it. So I could never bring myself to read it.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Oh, kq, that's too bad. It's an adorable little movie. Though I can see where the house filling up with mud with the children inside could traumatize a kid. That's probably a PG scene. The Great Owl and Brutus weren't much better.
Wow, that is a surprisingly creepy movie when you think about it.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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We saw the movie sometime after reading the book- I didn't like it as much- I think it's a what you saw first phonomenon.
I haven't thought of the book in years, actually. Now I desparately want to read it- the plot was rather deep the more I think about it.
Posts: 1757 | Registered: Oct 2004
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I wonder why they've never done much sex-specific dosage studies before. It seems like something that would be fairly obvious to do. Ahh well, hindsight, I suppose.
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Great link, Rivka. I wonder if further study in the brain's gender-specific gene expressions will lead to any bombshells?
Juxtapose, because you'd have to double your study samples, leading to higher costs. Plus, it's probably much harder to find female study participants, because of pregnancy and other female-specific concerns.
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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That doesn't really make sense to me. Instead of having 500 men in a study, why not 250 men and 250 women? Maybe I'm just displaying my ignorance here, but in this type of study, wouldn't you want the most heterogenous group (relevant to the drug in question of course) possible?
I'm also not sure what pregnancy would have to do with it. I can't imagine that such a large portion of our female population is pregnant at any one time. At least, not so large that they would be lacking for subjects.
The only thing I've been able to think of is some kind of subject prejudice where the testers are less willing (subconciously or otherwise) to risk women than men.
By the way, Morbo, do you work in this field, or a related one?
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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It's not just woman who happen to be pregnant, who of course are unsuitable for most drug-testing. It's all of the potentially fertile women, 16-40+, who could become pregnant during the trials.
No, I don't work in medicine. I just know a little (very little) about experiment design and double-blind studies.
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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And yet there are many clinical studies focusing on women in that age group that don't have difficulty finding subjects.
I don't doubt that reproductive concerns are considered in this process. It's just that eliminating the entire demographic as a viable source of data seems to me to be an overreaction.
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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The larger the study sample, the more it can be applied to people outside the study itself. When you're conducting the study, you wouldn't want to combine the two groups (men and women) if you're trying to find out how the drug reacts in men and women. However, you could have separate and then combined results, and be able to compare between genders. In the case of 500 test subjects, doubling the amount of partipants would be better than halving them in terms of how many you've got for each gender.
Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
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So I could never bring myself to read it.
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