WOMEN’S HEALTH: Researchers Ignore Gender Differences
Despite pressure from the Clinton Administration and Congress to improve women's health research, a new GAO study finds that health care researchers often ignore important differences between the sexes in clinical trials evaluating new treatments, the New York Times News reports. The GAO reports that federally funded scientists usually include women as subjects in research as required by law, but they often fail to analyze gender differences in clinical testing, despite requirements to do so. The GAO cautions that NIH's "haphazard job of tracking data on research that involves or affects women" leads to inconsistent and inaccurate results. Don Ralbovsky, an NIH spokesperson, declined to comment on the report. The GAO study will be released this month, while two other reports by an academic physician and several scientists will appear in The Journal of Women's Health this summer (Pear, 4/30).
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