Women have long been underrepresented in clinical trials related to cardiovascular health. What can researchers do to reverse that trend? The team behind a new analysis in European Heart Journal aimed to find out.
The study's authors noted that the disparity may be due in part to the fact that guideline-directed therapies rely on data that overwhelmingly includes men. Also, researchers over the years have grown accustomed to simply gathering data from white men and then hoping the findings also apply to everyone else.
“It was assumed that the results were also relevant to women and other races but evidence is emerging that this is not the case," first author Jeske van Diemen, MD, a specialist at Amsterdam University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, said in a prepared statement. "For instance, female heart patients have a greater risk of adverse drug reactions compared with male patients, and these reactions are generally more serious. Similarly, it has been suggested that women with heart failure may need lower doses of medications than their male counterparts."
To learn more about this topic, the team behind the analysis reviewed six articles that looked at the challenges associated with getting more women involved in clinical trials. Overall, they found that for both men and women tend to have the same basic motivation for participating in clinical trials: the possibility of access to high-quality care and the potential to make a real impact by promoting science.
Both men and women also cited time, apprehension about potentially being involved with experimental treatments and the risk of harm as potential barriers. Women, however, did seem to show more concern about the potential risk of harm (and issues related to transportation) than men.
The researchers recommended several solutions designed to improve the representation of women in cardiovascular trials:
- Greater focus on sex and gendered data in scientific journals and peer-reviewed media outlets specific to CVD
- Improvement in randomized controlled clinical trial design
- Increased diversity of the research team
- More sex and gendered educational curricula in medicine
- Improved access to clinical trial sites
“Currently we treat many patients as if they were the same, which of course is not the case," van Diemen said. "Study populations that better represent the demographics of society should lead to more relevant findings that improve cardiovascular outcomes for everyone."
Read the full study here.