In 1989, the Physician’s Health Study on the benefits of aspirin for heart disease included 22,000 men and no women—and not enough has changed in the decades since.
In fact, according to a 2018 ProPublica article, black women made up less than five percent of all participants in trials for 24 of the 31 cancer drugs approved since 2015. In studies where women are proportionately included, clinical trials often don’t consider hormone status or other gender-specific factors when evaluating the data.
This is significant because men and women’s bodies often respond differently to medical conditions and the resulting treatments. Men and women differ in metabolism, hormone levels, physical size, and perhaps other ways that are as yet unknown due to lack of research—but treatments are often developed based on the “average” clinical trial participant who tends to be white and male.
Just as important is that the lived experiences of individuals affect how they will respond to certain drugs. No Black females were included in the trials of Gardasil, the HPV vaccine that can help prevent cervical cancer—and it turns out that two of the strains of HPV most likely to cause cervical cancer in Black women are not covered by the vaccine.
Eliminating disparities begins with asking the right questions and having the right people answer those questions. One step in this direction is theAll of Us is a medical research program from the National Institutes of Health that aims to enroll one million or more participants from diverse backgrounds—women, people of color, people with disabilities or comorbidities, people living in rural communities and members of the LGBTQ community.
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