9 ms·
New study provides evidence that we need different drugs for men and women
- curry-castaway 8y agoDirect link to the study – "Electrophysiological and transcriptomic correlates of neuropathic pain in human dorsal root ganglion neurons": https://academic.oup.com/brain/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/brain/awz063 https://academic.oup.com/brain/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/br...
- m463 8y agoI was told that the clinical studies of birth control pills were done on male subjects.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sagartewari01 8y agoI guess they had 100% success rate.
- djsumdog 8y agoI'd assume it was mostly just to test their ability to harm/toxicity?
- NullPrefix 8y ago100% toxic.
- m463 8y agoI believe the fundamental reason was that testing on women of childbearing age was not recommended, so they tested on men.
- Consultant32452 8y agohttps://m.imgur.com/gallery/HEZ1eJY https://m.imgur.com/gallery/HEZ1eJY
- Frqy3 8y agoNot testing on women, and particularly avoiding pregnant women, is how to end up with another thalidomide case. Sure, you wouldn't want pregnant women to be amongst your first field test subjects. But you do want them to be included as part of the carefully monitored testing period, rather than wait until the drug goes commercial and there is not the same focus on looking for and collecting data on side effects.
- mamon 8y agoAre doctors even allowed to ask patients about their gender? That's sensitive private info, right? Also, people are free to choose their own gender and even change their mind about it every other week, so the therapy would need to be adjusted accordingly. /s
- djsumdog 8y agoI realize this is meant as a joke, but in all seriousness, this does go against some of the absurdist grain of what we're seeing today. No one should be bullied or made fun of for their beliefs, but the idea that biological sex is some type of subjective personal choice is ideological; even religious. Papers like this could seriously face censorship in the future, and it's something we need to address and take seriously.
- jonnybgood 8y ago> No one should be bullied or made fun of for their beliefs, but the idea that biological sex is some type of subjective personal choice is ideological; even religious. You’re confusing sex with gender.
- anon12345690 8y agothe people who change gender disagree, there are tons of trans people and supporters who dont believe in biological sex
- jonnybgood 8y agoOkay? They’ll be wrong too.
- anon12345690 8y agouh thats what the activists believe and its what the first comment was talking about. people in europe are being arrested because they used the "wrong" sex. of course theres a difference but if everyone accepted that then there wouldnt be a big problem now
- RavlaAvlar 8y agoTHAT IS SEXIST
- tomlock 8y agoI'd ask everyone who came to this article with the assumption that someone would object to or get offended by this finding, to actually observe if anyone does.
- Swizec 8y agoRight above you, someone getting offended that there aren’t enough trans people in the study. I thought that was an interesting coincidence. https://pasteboard.co/I6fhTWy.jpg https://pasteboard.co/I6fhTWy.jpg
- tomlock 8y agoSeems like a reasonable comment to me, and not an objection to the finding.
- apta 8y agoBiology (i.e. XX or XY or other less common variants) doesn't care about what someone thinks they are.
- tomlock 8y agoAh, so you agree that gender isn't binary.
- collyw 8y agostop using statistical anomalies to make your point
- apta 8y agoI'm talking about biological sex (which implies gender, there isn't anything 'gender' in biology). The vast majority of cases you see today with people claiming to be the sex they're not are psychological, not physical. They're men with XY chromosomes wanting to be women, or the opposite, women with XX chromosomes wanting to be men. The other cases (e.g. XXY and XYY) are very small in comparison.
- shard972 8y agoThe article says nothing about how many trans people they had enrolled in the study. I thought we were already past this but no, in 2019 trans individuals are still second class citizens.
- aura_inquiry 8y agoI believe explanation is that they simply excluded mentally ill applicants.
- Red_Tarsius 8y agoIt's already difficult to get enough funding as is, you can't realistically expect the researchers to allocate a meaningful amount of resources to survey 0.6 of the population.
- dang 8y agoIf you troll HN again we will ban you. And no more flamebait, please. We've had to warn you about this already. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 8y agoThe mechanism of action of analgesic drugs is very simple and well-understood. Considering the fact that the very same painkillers that humans use are effective on drastically different organisms, such as snails or crustaceans, I find it extremely unlikely that gender plays any significant role in their effectiveness. To be honest, it feels like this study was politically motivated.
- garmaine 8y agoSince ibuprofen impairs testosterone production, a key sex differentiating hormone, I'd not be surprised at all if there is a gender correlation in effectiveness or side effects.
- tropdrop 8y agoThe study is not disproving the efficacy of analgesic drugs of most organisms - only suggesting that not all pain mechanisms are well understood, which is a reasonable suggestion. Further, given our (US) current opioid epidemic and death count, I find the implication that "we don't need to study other pain-relieving drugs" dubious. Finally, do note that most analgesics have harmful side effects (acetaminophen - liver, NSAID - stomach bleeding). Does that mean they do not work as pain killers? No. But when a large portion of 50% of the population needs to take them for several days for 1 week of every month, we have every market incentive to look for other pain-relieving solutions. Just for a personal example, my mother's period pain warranted a prolonged combination of NSAIDs and acetaminophen all her life, for 1 week of every month. Had the pills been more effective, she might have needed fewer of them in a sitting, and may not be dealing with the stomach bleeding she has now.
- EvilTerran 8y ago> The mechanism of action of analgesic drugs is very simple and well-understood. https://academic.oup.com/bjaed/article/14/4/153/293533 https://academic.oup.com/bjaed/article/14/4/153/293533 (2013) the exact mechanism of action of paracetamol [ie acetamophen] remains to be determined. There is evidence for a number of central mechanisms, including effects on prostaglandin production, and on serotonergic, opioid, nitric oxide (NO), and cannabinoid pathways, and it is likely that a combination of interrelated pathways are in fact involved. That's the most widely-used analgesic in the world, and its mechanism is evidently neither simple nor well-understood.
- tropdrop 8y agoSome takeaways that underscore the fact that it took the NIH until 2016 to require animal research to feature both male and female animals - "Women greatly outnumber men among migraine sufferers, and women made up about 85 percent of the participants in the Phase 3 clinical trials of the three anti-CGRP drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2018. Price wonders if the anti-CGRP drugs aren’t specific to migraines—but to women. His work with mice suggests that the drugs don’t work in males, but block pain in females. Mogil once emailed a researcher, asking whether a pain drug worked better in men than women. The researcher didn’t know, and couldn’t pursue the question because the data was controlled by the pharmaceutical company. Mogil was left wondering if drugs that looked promising in male-only animal studies might have failed in clinical trials when the results were blended with those in women, depriving men of a viable treatment... [Meanwhile] medicines that could work best for women wouldn’t make it into the pipeline at all when basic science excluded female animals. Price wonders if unresolved pain among women might have led to their higher levels of chronic pain."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Simon_says 8y agoIt will be good to figure out which drugs work for which genders so people suffering from pain will know which gender to identify as for the most effective pain relief. If we find that some drugs are more effective on animal models, we can encourage otherkin.
- adrianN 8y agoYou're confusing sex and gender.
- Simon_says 8y agoBut I identify as someone who doesn't confuse sex and gender.
- anon12345690 8y agothe people who change genders disagree
- bashwizard 8y agoXX and XY doesn't change though.
- hutzlibu 8y agoSo slowly, it seems we are going back to the primitive healer's approach where they did not had a specific drug for a specific disease, but rather they made a individual combination of drugs (and other methods) for every individuals problems. Because, of course men and women are different so it should not be surprising that they react differently to drugs, but also men or women in itself are very different, depending on their genes obviously, but also their age, their routines, their diet etc. So good to hear, that we are going one more step away, from the generalistic approach. Which was a cheap way, thats why it did produced results as well, but maybe not the best results.
- rygxqpbsngav 8y agoYes. Ayurveda does treat every individual differently and does customized medicine on case-by-case basis after observing the patient carefully asking questions that provide root cause and then make a medicine that only works for that individual for that issue alone. No side effects. Modern medicine treats every one equal and prints a list of side effects on drugs as if they are nothing. But it is the body's way of saying it is not happy with whatever external chemical he has taken is not for that body! Finally it's a good step which modern medicine is ignoring for ages even after advised by a few before.
- adrianN 8y agoAyurveda hasn't been shown to work better than placebo as far as I know.
- rygxqpbsngav 8y agoThen you don't know anything about true ayurveda. Have you ever met someone practicing ayurveda for anything and got treated? I got cured for 2 things, one of which has no known medicine (only repeated surgery for life) and it never got back in past 18 years.
- adrianN 8y ago
- dusted 8y agoNo! We're all the same and must get EXACTLY the same treatment, no matter gender or ethnicity.</sarcasm>
- belorn 8y agoThe article starts out with saying that drug development begins with studies on male rats and mice, but then goes on to describe difference the biological pathways for pain in men and women. That creates some obvious question. How similar is the pain pathways between humans and rats, and is it more similar than between women and men? There should basically be 6 sources of differences. Animal M vs Human M, Animal F vs human F, Animal M vs Human F, Animal F vs Human M, Animal F vs Animal M, and last Human M vs Human F. A difference in any of those could potential cause a wrong conclusion in a study. The question I hope researcher has is which of those are more likely to have a significant difference in pain research
- coldacid 8y agoDifferent model animals are picked for different types of medical studies, or at least they are supposed to be, based on similarities between the model and humans within the context of the functionalities under test.
- pysxul 8y agoGood luck transgender
- known 8y agoAnd women also display different cardiac symptoms from men https://outline.com/aYwSJV https://outline.com/aYwSJV
- damla 8y agoLink to another recent study related to pain differences between men and women (Male-Specific Conditioned Pain Hypersensitivity in Mice and Humans) https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)31496-9 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...
- wtdata 8y agoIt is interesting, but since quite a few examples here pertain the brain. By accepting the conclusions of the article we must also accept the idea - presently under attack - that there are indeed clear biological differences between the male and female brains.
- omnomnomtea 8y agoI don't think it's as black-and-white as that. There can be statistical differences on average, without requiring that every brain is unambiguously classifiable as "male" or "female" on a biological level based on that trait. For example- if a drug works well for 80% of women and 15% of men, that implies that there are some men whose brains utilize the "female" pain pathway and some women who use the "male" pain pathway. It also suggests that that drug might be a good first line of treatment for female patients and a secondary or tertiary line of treatment for male patients. Trying to classify brains like this is like trying to classify sex based on height- on average it sort of works, but there's enough overlap between the heights of women and men that you can't actually do it reliably on an individual level. So tl;dr I don't think that "clear biological differences between the male and female brains" is actually a reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from this research.
- freshm087 8y agoYes, except practically nobody claims that it's black-and-what. This idea which is under attack (for which James Damore got fired, for example) is that measuring equality by setting 50/50 female-to-male ratio as an ideal doesn't reflect reality, because in general sex differences very likely exist beyond culture, and they logically should lead to different representation in various fields of occupation.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cartercole 8y agoI thought that there was like no difference between men and women physically?
- amanaplanacanal 8y agoYou should probably get out more. Viva la difference!