Healthcare 'must be tailored to gender'

DICK AHLSTROM

PEOPLE ARE receiving inadequate healthcare and experience bad health outcomes because factors relating to gender are not being taking into account.

Premature death is a consequence of this failure, a session at the EuroScience Open Forum in Turin has been told.

Men and women can respond differently to the same drug and a disease’s progress can be significantly different. Many diseases arise because of lifestyle aspects of gender, according to experts at the session, “The Promises of Gender Medicine: are Sex and Gender the Key to a Better Heathcare?”

Much of the problem arose because most drugs and treatments were based on a standard model, the 75kg, white western male, according to Dr Ineke Klinge of Maastricht University, who organised the session. “This is not good clinical practice any more,” she said yesterday.

This model told researchers nothing about the response of women, the elderly, children and people of a different ethnicity and meant patients were receiving “inadequate healthcare and resulted in bad health outcomes”.

Gender could also affect the quality of healthcare, Dr Klinge added. It could foster wrong beliefs, for example that men did not get osteoporosis or women did not suffer from heart disease.

Researchers were beginning to take these issues into account and results showed the way tissues within the body reacted to disease could be very different between men and women, she said.

“This is new, this is innovative,” said Dr Alan While of Leeds Metropolitan University, who heads Britain’s first Centre for Men’s Health. “Five or 10 years ago we would not be having this conversation.”