New study provides evidence that we need different drugs for men and women
wired.com
wired.com
"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."
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.
Or am I missing something?
(Your answer comes across as implying "no one is the same we can't possibly disprove / prove this stuff")
Or am I missing something?"
I don't know much about Ayurveda, but the general idea is, that there are no people with the exact same problems/symptoms.
Which is not, how far I would take it, so you have to do generalisations, but maybe much finer grained.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.