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health advisory Hospital Health advisory 2007-11-16 5:20:58

For example, I just read this morning the following: "New guidelines from the American Heart Association - It is the first time guidelines have urged all women to consider aspirin for preventing strokes..."

A ton of research seems to center on men initially. Men and women's bodies differ in some ways, but when studies focusing on treatments for diseases of the heart, kidneys, blood, etc., (something all humans have), why shouldn't the results for the new standards of treatment apply to both men AND women?

Answer:

Average size and weigh differentials have an effect on dosages.

The actions of hormones have a lot to do with metabolizing some medications for heart, kidneys and blood, and I think in the beginning they used men for the research because they didn't have to worry about them getting pregnant and testing unknown drugs on both the patient and a fetus. In fact it was assumed that what men used could be used on women, but that turned out not to be true. Women even present with different symptoms of heart disease which led doctors to misdiagnose a heart attack in women as something else.

It may surprise you to learn that although the elderly take more prescriptions than the young, testing ages usually stop at 50 and never go above 75 so it a drug is rarely tested on its intended target age.

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Diseases don't necessarily express themselves in the same way in men and women. Women have different symptoms of heart disease than men do. They also may react differently to drugs used for treatment.

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Women and men have different bodies, different hormones and they have different rates of stroke and heart disease before menopause.

In women, the menstrual cycle seems somewhat protective of the vascular system. It turns out that if you give aspirin to people who are less likely to have heart attacks or strokes, then you actually wind up subjecting them to the risks (of bleeding, bruising, and rarely haemorrhagic bleeds in the brain etc) without much of the benefit of cardioprotection/stroke protection.

This is why studies on men are not always applicable to women.

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hormones - you women are a lot more chemically imbalanced than us men.

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