When it comes to diagnosing disease and choosing a course of treatment, gender is a significant factor. In a Stanford BeWell Q&A, Marcia Stefanick, PhD, a professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center and co-director of the Stanford Women & Sex Differences in Medicine Center, discusses why gender medicine research benefits both sexes and why physicians need to do a better job of taking sex difference into consideration when make medical decisions.
Below Stefanick explains why a lack of understanding about the different clinical manifestations of prevalent diseases in women and men can lead to health disparities:
…Because we may have primarily studied a particular disease in only one of the sexes, usually males (and most basic research is done in male rodents), the resulting treatments are most often based on that one sex’s physiology. Such treatments in the other sex might not be appropriate. One example is sleep medication. Ambien is the prescription medicine recently featured on the TV show, 60 Minutes. Reporters found out that women were getting twice the dose they should because they had been given the men’s doses; consequently, the women were falling asleep at the wheel and having accidents. Physicians had not taken into account that women are smaller and their livers’ metabolize drugs differently than do men’s. Some women have responded by reducing their own medication dosages, and yet that practice of self-adjusting is not the safest way to proceed, either.