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Why Women AREN'T Studied Medically | Dr. Mary Claire Haver

16 Jul 2024 · 1 min

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Dr. Mary Claire Haver explains why women were excluded from medical research until 1993, when the NIH finally required their inclusion. Researchers had removed women from trials to avoid pregnancy complications after thalidomide caused birth defects. Women cost more to study because of menstrual cycles and menopause, so doctors prescribed treatments tested only on men, like statins for heart disease, despite no evidence they work for women.

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Women were not even required legally to be in studies until 1993 from the NIH. Now that happened because thalidomide was being used in pregnant women for nausea and it ended up causing birth defects and that freaked everyone out, understandably. But they removed all women from studies after that just in case they might get pregnant. Then when you talk to researchers, it's much more expensive and harder to study women because of their cycles or because of peri or post-menopause. And men are just predictable. So they just study mostly men and just take those things and infer them to women when we don't really understand the gender differences and the sex differences and how cardiovascular medications affect. So greatest example, statins, right? We use statins left and right to treat high cholesterol. Most women will have significant elevations of cholesterol through menopause. So here she goes through the change, boom, her cholesterol goes up, goes to her PCP, you need a statin. Statins have never been shown in women to decrease the risk of a heart attack.