Use of male mice skews drug research against women, study finds

This article was written by someone who obviously has little knowledge how drugs are actually discovered and developed.<p>First, as someone already pointed out, mouse models kind of suck. They are very different than humans, so adding in female mice isn&#x27;t really going to tell you a whole lot.<p>Second, a core tenet of research is to minimize your variables. Adding in female mice (who go through estrus cycles) is probably going to mess up your results and make them even harder to interpret. Plus, you&#x27;d have to double the size of your study to maintain statistical power.<p>Third, once a drug passes into human testing, females are already included in research (unless it&#x27;s a purely male disease). So we&#x27;re not really missing anything here. If a drug company did limit testing to males, the FDA would take them to task and probably limit their use in males only. Why would a drug company want to cut off half of their potential customers.<p>What a terrible article overall.

sometimes I read an article, like this one, that has a sound basis in science, look at the headline, look at where its published, think about the target audience that will read the article, and can&#x27;t help but question the &quot;why&quot; that article was published.<p>Is there any reason at all to publish an article about the gender of research mice in <i></i>the Guardian<i></i> except to push some kind of political gender agenda?<p>I ask specifically because of the article&#x27;s last 4 paragraphs. They are so laden with gender agenda it kind of blows my mind.

Use of mice skews drug research against humans also. Not that I want to use drugs on humans. But you have to wonder how many drugs there are that work on humans but not mice.

&gt; ...the ways in which the male and female brains differ may have remained under-investigated due to a backlash against the idea of there being meaningful differences between the male and female brain.<p>This is bad. Contemporary views affecting scientific research is not a good direction to go. The religious, dark-ageesque nature of the above statement is obvious: It&#x27;s a fight against attempts to undermine a comfortable preconceived idea.<p>I believe, similar to the famous quote about free-speech[0], that we must fight for science to have free-reigns in it&#x27;s research directions even if we don&#x27;t like the premise or the possible outcomes. Nothing should be off-limits in the pursuit of (a close approximation of) the truth.<p>Besides, science is not sensational, it&#x27;s actually rather boring (in a good way), especially when considering single studies. It is the far-fetched interpretations of the results that are sensational, and therefor problematic. And these are usually done by attention-seeking media outlets.<p>It shouldn&#x27;t be the scientist&#x27;s responsibility to steer clear of research that might be interpreted sensationally, and the universities shouldn&#x27;t discourage such research for fear of &quot;bad press&quot; but rather champion it in the name science-above-politics.<p>----------------------<p>[0] &quot;I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it&quot; - Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Related: there was a study mentioned in a pop science article recently showing that ketogenic diets were not effective in female mice compared to male, until the female mice had their ovaries removed. Unfortunately, I&#x27;m unable to find the study itself.

People are arguing about the use of mice etc..but it has been shown that medical care is male-oriented which negative affects female outcomes (heart disease and attacks for example.)

Poor mice. The scientists should experiment on their body, not on some other body. This is cruel.

It&#x27;s sort of weird to see this article framed as a progressive move against male bias when it seems to buy wholesale into a gender essentialialist worldview. The piece even touches on it at the end, dropping a hand grenade in its last line:<p>&quot;There’s nothing anti-feminist about saying the neurobiology in the female brain might be different.&quot;<p>- I&#x27;m not sure about this ^<p>That being said, I don&#x27;t think the practice of using exclusively male mice in lab testing can be justified either. For the same reason: reject gender essentialism.