Why Female Health Suffers: Shocking Revelation on Exclusive Use of Male Mice in Scientific Experiments!

If you’ve ever taken a drug, then you’ve benefited from animal research. But ten years ago, if you looked at a scientific report that involved mice or rats, it probably would have used only male animals.

This means that even now, if you are a woman and the medicine has only been developed and tested on male animals, we don’t know how that medicine will affect you.

Scientists have long assumed that women would respond the same way as men in drug trials. But today, that situation is changing. More and more studies use both male and female animals, and as a result new science on important sex differences is emerging.

For example, a growing body of evidence from animal studies is highlighting Complex sex differences in rodent brains.in relation to their size, shape, and how nerve cells connect to each other.

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This article is part of women’s health issues, a series on the health and well-being of women and girls around the world. From menopause to miscarriage, pleasure to pain, the articles in this series will delve into the full spectrum of women’s health issues to provide valuable information, insights, and resources for women of all ages.

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It is therefore not surprising that research is also increasingly showing sex differences in human medical problems. For example, women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with depression, and the sex differences are also clear in People’s response to antidepressants.. Women have a stronger response than men to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), while men have a better response to tricyclic antidepressants.

never assume

Excluding women from research for so long has had worrying consequences for women’s health. One example is adverse drug reactions: the unintended consequences of taking a drug, which can include things like nausea, headaches, seizures, or heart problems.

women usually have double the risk for adverse drug reactions (although men are at higher risk of some side effects). One reason is that women, on average, are smaller than men, yet the recommended dosage for many medications is based on men.

For example, women who drink beta blockers, used to treat heart problems, have higher concentrations in the blood. This is not just because the same amount of medication in a smaller volume of blood will give you a higher concentration. women too metabolize many medications differently from mendue to levels of sex hormones and enzyme activity.

Why were women excluded?

In science, we like to reduce variability as much as possible, in order to be more confident that any change in an animal or human is due to the experimental intervention we have performed.

Females were largely excluded from animal and human clinical trials due to menstrual cycle. Fluctuating hormone levels make data difficult to interpret, results more variable, and research more expensive. While men have the same sex steroid hormones, female hormone levels go up and down. This can affect brain function and behavior, as well as the female response to medication.

However, the estrous cycle of rodents is much shorter than that of women, only four or five days, and research in the last decade has shown that the behavior of the female rat is no more variable as a result.

In part, the male-focused approach to human clinical trials was also due to the fact that women of childbearing age could be pregnant and not yet know it. He thalidomide tragedy fed into this mentality. Thalidomide was developed in the 1950s as a sedative and became a popular treatment for morning sickness, but the drug had not been tested in pregnant animals or in humans.

Doctors soon realized that thalidomide was linked to developmental abnormalities in children born to mothers taking the drug. But it was already too late for him. An estimated 10,000 babies worldwide born with underdeveloped legs and arms and other birth defects.

Are things getting better?

There is a growing field of research looking at the interaction between medications and the menstrual cycle, changes during pregnancy, and hormonal contraception. For example, some antiepileptic drugs may reduce the effectiveness of hormonal contraception, while hormonal contraception may reduce the effectiveness of some antiepileptic drugs in controlling seizures. But the many years that women were excluded from the studies mean that there is still a lot we don’t know.

Women were only legally required to be included in clinical trials in the 1990s in the US Some 30 years later, research shows that about half of the participants in clinical studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US medical research agency, now they are women.

These policies are also evolving to integrate both biological sex (defined genetically) and gender (a person’s self-identity) in the design, analysis, and reporting of clinical research. Many scientific magazines
are too join the unit publish only studies that have considered gender in design, analysis and reporting.

Meanwhile, female mice have been a long time coming into the research landscape. In 2014, the NIH, one of the largest funders of medical research in the world, Announced that all grant applications had to include a balance of male and female cells and animals. Since then, this policy has been adopted by the main funders of research in other countriessuch as the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the European Commission.

Change takes time. Timelines vary dramatically, but it often takes 10-15 years to develop a new drug. Then there are clinical trials, which can take a long time depending on how difficult it is to recruit participants.

We are moving into an era of personalized medicine, where drugs can be prescribed based on individual diagnosis, with targeted interventions based on understanding how an individual patient’s genomes (DNA instruction set) affect response to treatment. But women will miss out on many of the benefits if we don’t understand exactly how the drug they are prescribed affects women.