Brown Med School’s McGregor on “Sex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Women’s Health"
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Brown Med School’s McGregor on “Sex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Women’s Health"
McGregor, the Co-Founder and Director for the Division of Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine, talked about her path to the Alpert Medical School -- and why she wanted to focus on gender in medicine.
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“When you think back to how evidence medicine really started to gear up and we created the scientific method and everyone agreed this was sound science, that was about the time there were a few examples where women of reproductive age would enter a study then take a particular medication [and] have some sort of bad reaction when they were becoming pregnant during the study,” she said.
“So there was this general sense we should protect women of childbearing age," she said. "At the same time, researchers found that it was actually easier to study men because you didn’t have to control for the state of the menstrual cycle — men’s testosterone is fairly stable.”
“At one time, [science] was looking for simplicity, and wanted to really state there was a cause and effect, and so women were dropped off the research pipeline,” said McGregor. “All of our research on cardiovascular disease and stroke and cancer and infections were based on men and the male model — now we’re realizing women have a different biological sex, their DNA and different gender identities the related to cultural health and well-being that were not taken into account.”
Gender and Coronavirus
“This pandemic has really highlighted some faults in our healthcare system and it’s also highlighted the fact that biological sex can be an extremely important component,” said McGregor.
“Men have two times the mortality rate when they are infected with a severe case of COVID-19,” she said. “So what we do is say, why does this exist, is it because testosterone is detrimental, is it because the lack of estrogen is doing something, because the immune system in women — we know that women have a more robust innate immune system, so perhaps it has to do with some of the chromosomal contents of immunity — or is social-cultural behavior?”
“By actually looking at all these components, we’ll be able to individualize treatments and have effective preventative strategies and I think now is the time for us to get this right, because we’re fast-tracking therapies, fast tracking the vaccines and we want to make sure these clinical trials are including men and women and binding them to the study if sex differences are there,” she said.
About Smart Health
Since granting its first Doctor of Medicine degrees in 1975, the Warren Alpert Medical School has become a national leader in medical education and biomedical research. By attracting first-class physicians and researchers to Rhode Island over the past four decades, the Medical School and its seven affiliated teaching hospitals have radically improved the state's health care environment, from health care policy to patient care.
"Smart Health" is a GoLocalProv.com segment featuring experts from The Warren Alpert Medical School GoLocal LIVE.