Mij
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
A handful of immunologists are pushing the field to take attributes such as sex chromosomes, sex hormones, and reproductive tissues into account.
Ignoring such differences prior to a drug’s approval can increase the risk of harmful, and potentially even life-threatening, effects. That is assuming those differences are studied in the first place; historically, the vast majority of clinical trials enrolled primarily men. Women often bore the worst of the side effects. Between 1997 and 2001, eight out of 10 drugs that the FDA pulled from the market were found after approval to pose greater health risks in women. “The drugs that came on the market were really for men,” says Rosemary Morgan, one of Klein’s colleagues at Hopkins.
Klein’s work suggests that these biological sex differences affect how we respond to viruses. Women are known to report more adverse events after vaccines, and this has long been thought to be due to gender rather than sex—for example, maybe men are reluctant to report such events, or women are more likely to report perceptions of pain. But by the late 2000s, Klein and others showed that in addition to any such differences, females need far less vaccine to mount the same antibody response as males.
These findings were “really groundbreaking,” Benn says. “That seems quite clear from the research that Sabra has done, and others, that we need perhaps to have sex-differential vaccination programs.”
Giving women a lower dose of the flu vaccine, which could be equally effective while reducing side effects, could potentially reduce vaccine hesitancy. Klein has advocated for such a policy in numerous lectures, interviews, and scientific articles, as well as in a 2009 New York Times op-ed titled “Do Women Need Such Big Flu Shots?” So far, however, the idea has gained little traction.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/15/1056908/biological-sex-immune-system/
Ignoring such differences prior to a drug’s approval can increase the risk of harmful, and potentially even life-threatening, effects. That is assuming those differences are studied in the first place; historically, the vast majority of clinical trials enrolled primarily men. Women often bore the worst of the side effects. Between 1997 and 2001, eight out of 10 drugs that the FDA pulled from the market were found after approval to pose greater health risks in women. “The drugs that came on the market were really for men,” says Rosemary Morgan, one of Klein’s colleagues at Hopkins.
Klein’s work suggests that these biological sex differences affect how we respond to viruses. Women are known to report more adverse events after vaccines, and this has long been thought to be due to gender rather than sex—for example, maybe men are reluctant to report such events, or women are more likely to report perceptions of pain. But by the late 2000s, Klein and others showed that in addition to any such differences, females need far less vaccine to mount the same antibody response as males.
These findings were “really groundbreaking,” Benn says. “That seems quite clear from the research that Sabra has done, and others, that we need perhaps to have sex-differential vaccination programs.”
Giving women a lower dose of the flu vaccine, which could be equally effective while reducing side effects, could potentially reduce vaccine hesitancy. Klein has advocated for such a policy in numerous lectures, interviews, and scientific articles, as well as in a 2009 New York Times op-ed titled “Do Women Need Such Big Flu Shots?” So far, however, the idea has gained little traction.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/15/1056908/biological-sex-immune-system/
