Gender Health Gap: That is why gender medicine is so important for us women

Although women and men are biologically different and therefore have to be treated differently medically, women are not sufficiently taken into account in pension studies, medication tests and the development of forms of therapy.

The proportion of women has increased in recent years, but it is far from being so strong that there is a balance. The lack of gender -specific medicine is today referred to as the "gender health gap" or "gender data gap".

As a reason for the low proportion of women in studies, the small number of participants in a study is often listed, which makes it impossible to look at genders differently. Women are also subject to hormonal fluctuations that could falsify and make the results of a study unusable.

Studies with the involvement of women are therefore more complex, more complicated and more expensive. In addition, there is the fear that late consequences of a medication test could occur in pregnancy or the birth of a child.

For a long time, medicines in research have been tested exclusively on men or male animals. At the beginning of the 1990s, however, it was increasingly recognized that medications in women work differently than in men. This is the case with Aspirin, for example. In 1994, a US guideline asked for the first time to test medication from now on to subjects.

But 27 years later the problem is still there. Politicians have also reacted in this country and there are nowGuidelinesTo gender distribution in clinical studies, unfortunately, these have not always been implemented.Studiesshow that 70 percent of animal experiments are still on male rats today, only 10 percent of female.

The problem:The active ingredients largely developed for men are then used to treat diseases in women. But just because men tolerate a medication well does not mean that this must also be the case with women. Side effects and intolerances are thus inevitable.

Digoxin became clear on the drug Digoxin that medication in women and men can have a very different way. Doctors analyzed this medication at the end of the 1990s, which is used for cardiac muscle weakness and cardiac arrhythmia, in aLong -term studyUnder the inclusion of gender -specific differences, and found that digoxin only worked in men, while women who took it died on average earlier due to their heart problems.

Although women differ in their body composition, their hormones and their metabolism from men, only a difference between the sexes is rarely made when dosing a drug. The result: active ingredients and vaccines are often overdosed in women.

Another problem in health care: Many diseases have not been sufficiently researched in women. For example, the number of heart attacks in women is almost as high as in men. As early as the 1980s, it was found that women die much more often after a heart attack than men.

The reason: heart attacks were not recognized in time due to false or late diagnoses. Instead of the typical male symptoms, such as chest pain or tightness in the chest, women showed completely different symptoms, such as nausea, exhaustion and vomiting. You didn't link it to a heart attack.

Not only physical complaints, but also mental illnesses, can express themselves differently in men and women - and are usually less known or less researched in women.

For a long time, for example, women were with "Hysteria“Diagnosed. Under the term, almost everything could fall that women burdened and what medicine could not narrow down at the time.

Symptoms of post -traumatic stress disorder or depression and even infertility - all of this and more was summarized under the term "female hysteria" during the 18th and 19th centuries. It was not until 1980 that the term was deleted from medical terminology.

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However, the prejudices that the diagnosis of "hysteria" have brought with them are still noticeable. Prejudices that women are "more dramatic" or "emotional" than men are persistent. And women can make it difficult for women to be taken seriously with their symptoms.

Also autism orADHD diagnosesare usually made significantly later in women than in men. Symptoms for the attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder are usually less obvious in women.

All of this shows how important it is that medicine takes into account the differences between women and men. This is where the so -called gender medicine comes into play. Gender medicine deals with the gender differences between women and men, with both biological and social factors playing a role.

In Germany, the Berlin Charité is still the only medical institute that deals with gender medicine. But gender research in medicine has become more and more present in recent years. At the University of Halle there has been a Vice Canate for gender since 2014, which also works for a gender -sensitive degree of medicine.

TheGerman medical leafAlso reports that the Federal Ministry of Health promotes your twelve products with a focus on gender medicine with around 4.1 million.

Vera Regitz-Zagrose, Professor of Gender Medicine and Stefanie Schmid-Altringer, doctor, science journalist and filmmaker, also demand in her book “Gender Medicine.