Use of Male Mice Skews Drug Research Against Women, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 157
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The male mind is rational and orderly while the female one is complicated and hormonal. It is a stereotype that has skewed decades of neuroscience research towards using almost exclusively male mice and other laboratory animals, according to a new study. Scientists have typically justified excluding female animals from experiments -- even when studying conditions that are more likely to affect women -- on the basis that fluctuating hormones would render the results uninterpretable. However, according to Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, in Boston, it is entirely unjustified by scientific evidence, which shows that, if anything, the hormones and behavior of male rodents are less stable than those of females. Shansky is calling for stricter requirements to include animals of both sexes in research, saying the failure to do so has led to the development of drugs that work less well in women. One example that the report mentions is with the sleeping drug Ambien, which had been tested in male animals and then men in clinical trials. It "was later shown to be far more potent in women because it was metabolized more slowly in the female body," the report says. "Across all drugs, women tended to suffer more adverse side effects and overdoses."
In mice (Score:2, Funny)
In mice
Obligatory (Score:1)
IN MICE [twitter.com]
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What cynical, anti-science, non-consensus rot.
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I'm a scientist, and I'm pretty sure the "in mice" movement is a drive to be more factual, clear with the public, scientific, and reflective of our collective scientific understanding that mice are not people.
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Not at all. You can do anything with males. Females are special and must be protected, by other females. Males are unable to protect females. In fact everything males do or do not do to females is in fact exploiting them.
The solution? Kill all males, especially the white ones. Females can reproduce through parthenogenesis.
That's apart from the obvious... (Score:2)
Mice != humans. And lab mice are a special kind I believe.
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Who wants to find out that the "mice" are now "different" and the lab can do the review?
Same mice as always, same results globally, all is good.
New and different mice and its hard work to find the "same" mice needed and do the work.
A common standard in lab mice is used for a very good reason.
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Except that female mice are primarily used for breeding and have this pesky little thing called hormones. They go in heat every 4-5 days. But I'm sure the entire field of biology is going to be overturned by a neuroscientist SJW opinion paper.
Re:That's apart from the obvious... (Score:5, Insightful)
and have this pesky little thing called hormones
Female humans have those same pesky hormones. So testing on female mice makes sense.
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Use the same mice, get the same result.
Change up the mice and get what?
Was it the new mice? The lab? The idea?
Ask another lab to the test again? Do they have the "right" mice ready?
Do they have to find the "right" mice before they can start?
A common standard matters. Thats why its "common" and a "standard"
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Of course, using up your female mice to do lab studies is a great way to limit the supply of mice. Remember, one male mouse can knock up a whole bunch of female mice. The reverse, not so much.
Basically, same reasoning as to why farmers keep one bull and a lot of cows - it makes the bull happy, and lets you have the maximum possible number of calves....
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That's the problem with that kind of testing. It applies only for the conditions that it's tested in.
If you take a male mouse from an identified genetic line as the control, then you need to run comparisons against various other genetic lines and especially across sex.
That'll give an idea of what kind of variability you'd expect in the human trials, or whether there are other confounding factors that simply don't show up in a single strain experiment.
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Yes... that gets at an issue that a lot of people seem to have trouble with. It's fine to use a very carefully controlled standard (e.g. male, genetically identical mice) so that your work can be easily replicated in another lab. *But* in order to make any kind of general statements about your findings its necessary to actually show that they hold in other populations.
Re:That's apart from the obvious... (Score:5, Funny)
Mice != humans. And lab mice are a special kind I believe.
Exactly. Decades of feminists have told us that women are equal to men in every single way, how dare they experiment on unequal mice! And how dare these drugs be so sexist as to work differently in women!
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Actually the Founding Fathers are to blame, they wrote "all men are created equal" which clearly means they think all men are just clones and the same in every single way.
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Actually the Founding Fathers are to blame, they wrote "all men are created equal" which clearly means they think all men are just clones and the same in every single way.
I think I may have found a new sig.
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I was trying to think of a way to phrase it for a sig but couldn't come up with anything good. If you have any ideas please feel free.
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I was trying to think of a way to phrase it for a sig but couldn't come up with anything good. If you have any ideas please feel free.
hm you're right, it's trickier than I thought. I love the sentiment though.
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"All men were created equal" - Thomas Jefferson, scientifically illiterate biology denier and trans activist
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Haha brilliant! Add SJW feminazi there too?
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Actually the Founding Fathers are to blame, they wrote "all men are created equal" which clearly means they think all men are just clones and the same in every single way.
That word does not mean what it would have to mean in order for that to make sense. Equal means equivalent, not identical.
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That's was my point. I was being sarcastic.
Although to be honest it's not all that clear exactly what they meant... They didn't fully extend rights to women or black men, for example.
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They meant the same thing the ancient Greeks meant in their democracy:
* men are defined as having penises, owning property and not being owned by another man. If you're not in ancient Greece, men are also white.
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The thing is, while a mouse's metabolism isn't QUITE human, it's close enough that, to a clinical researcher, you're essentially a 75 kilogram rat.
Yeah, human females are different (Score:3)
All drugs go through human testing anyway. So this is likely to be a complete non-issue but, you know. Teh sexisms.
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Animal Cruelty (Score:2, Interesting)
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1. Misogyny isn't narrowly defined as "hating the other gender", and
2. What I was attempting to imply is that there's a high degree of overlap between people who complain about feminists / feminism and misogyny, not that those who complain about about feminists / feminism are misogynists because of that complaint per se.
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Re:Does it really matter that much? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's 4 additional stages of human trials, which I'm sure they use both men and women (or the article would surely have mentioned it because.. duh.. it's far more relevant).
It was explicitly mentioned in TFS that testing was being done exclusively on men in some cases.
One example that the report mentions is with the sleeping drug Ambien, which had been tested in male animals and then men in clinical trials.
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Traditionally, drugs were tested in men for the same reasons that we excluded women from the draft and other requirements. Women were a protected class. Men are expendable, you do medical experiments on men (see: the Tuskagee syphillis experiments done on black men, not black women). Naturally, this is a double-edged sword for women.
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My point being: if they'd traditionally tested drugs on women, then we'd be having the same outcry, but about the history of how they used women a guinea pigs for drugs. Drugs were not tested on women for this very reason: to avoid public backlash.
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Good thing they used mice instead of guinea pigs, then.
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My point being: if they'd traditionally tested drugs on women, then we'd be having the same outcry, but about the history of how they used women a guinea pigs for drugs. Drugs were not tested on women for this very reason: to avoid public backlash.
Remember thalidomide? The drug companies remember that it doesn't matter whether it happens after market release or in clinical trials.
The sexual apparatus of mice may or may not have an outcome related to human males and females. The only way to be sure is to do human tests on both. And one spontaneous pregnancy issue will destroy everything.
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And if they had tested drugs on women, all measures of efficacy would have been lost in the side effect reporting.
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Well, the example they provided seemed kind of off to me.
Everyone should know that you typically need to give a smaller dose of basically everything to women because they typically have a lower weight than men on average. So of course the dosage they can take is smaller. Same thing when medicating kids. You need to cut the dose even further.
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It was explicitly mentioned in TFS that testing was being done exclusively on men in some cases.
It is a problem of legal issues.
If a woman is in clinical trials, becomes pregnant, and there is anything wrong with the child, it pretty much destroys the drug and all the money spent on it, and makes one hellava liability problem for the company. It doesn't matter if the drug was the cause, or if it was a spontaneous birth defect.
And in the ensuing trial, juries have shown great sympathy toward mother and child - that's a pretty natural response.
An example of the effect is the plan Andrew Wakefiel
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Drug trials have enrolled both men and women for some time. It's true that in the past trials were often exclusively men, mostly because male participants were easier to acquire; a lot of trials were done in the military.
No drug would get approved today for both sexes if it was tested only in males. Use of effective birth control is very often a requirement for participation though.
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Drug trials have enrolled both men and women for some time. It's true that in the past trials were often exclusively men, mostly because male participants were easier to acquire; a lot of trials were done in the military.
No drug would get approved today for both sexes if it was tested only in males. Use of effective birth control is very often a requirement for participation though.
This is real, and the liability is huge.
Anyhow, here's some info https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] https://www.womenshealth.gov/a... [womenshealth.gov]
Even for drugs thought to be safe, the drug companies pass the buck to the doctors, who are then on the hook if something goes wrong.
If we take your dismissal of my liability notion, all allowable drugs would be declared safe for all men and women, including pregnant ones.
This is an actual and ongoing problem, and in today's world of social constructs trumping physi
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I'm not sure what you think I'm dismissing. If it's the claim that human drug trials are routinely run with men only, that's demonstrably not true.
If it's that pregnant women aren't routinely enrolled, that *is* true, and I specifically mentioned that being on birth control is often a requirement for participation. Testing a drug for use during pregnancy requires a bunch of specialized methods so pregnant women shouldn't be enrolled in regular trials. Would you get sued to hell and back if you did so? Yeah,
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I'm not sure what you think I'm dismissing. If it's the claim that human drug trials are routinely run with men only, that's demonstrably not true.
I fear that if you thought I said that trials were male only, I'll apologize. I don't think I ever did, but I have said that a woman can be a liability because of reproduction issues.
https://endpoints.elysiumhealt... [elysiumhealth.com]
Apparently we need many more women in these trials. The story says that there is an apparent discrimination based on sexual more's of the patriarchy.
"The male mind is rational and orderly while the female one is complicated and hormonal. It is a stereotype that has skewed decades of neu
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Yes, the story is full of shit.
Regarding pregnant women, as I said, it is common to require that they use birth control. It doesn't skew the results. If anything, it introduces a very common background medication, making the study more realistic. There are situations where hormonal birth control might interfere, in which case there are, you know, condoms, IUDs, sponges, etc.
wow, just wow (Score:2, Interesting)
It is a _stereotype_ that women are hormonal?
Has the author of this article ever associated or lived with a biological "default" female?
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I guess you never heard the expression, "she's with her period".
In Other News... (Score:1)
Use of Mice Skews Drug Research Against Humans, Study Finds
Use of female mice does the same for men (Score:2)
Look at the HPV vaccine. They didn't give it to males for years only females. Why? They just ran the trial on women so there was no data on males. Its almost as if their methodology is wrong and they can't identify why.
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Maybe, just maybe, they could start keeping track of results on the mice depending on the gender of said mice.
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Re: Use of female mice does the same for men (Score:2)
No, it kills both men and women. It's just that when something kills women in greater numbers, everyone forgets about the men.
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and HPV (cervical cancer) kills women, not men.
Wrong. It also causes penile cancer in men and throat cancer in all sexes. But it's rarely mentioned because if something is perceived as affecting only women it gets much more funding and support to solve the problem.
Wait (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought gender was a social construct.
I'm feeling triggered, hitler.
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Gender is a social construct, sex isn't.
Government should be involved only in determination of sex, and prevention of discrimination, and otherwise stay out of gender entirely; just like government should be involved in contract resolution, but should otherwise stay out of marriage entirely.
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According to my thesaurus gender and sex are synonyms. Nice try at rewriting history.
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According to my thesaurus gender and sex are synonyms. Nice try at rewriting history.
The whole point of a thesaurus is to find words which have similar meaning, not the same.
Try a dictionary next time.
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That makes no sense. If gender is a biological fact and gender roles are derived from basic gender facts, then gender roles have at least a major influence from biology, even if you accept the hypothesis that gender roles can be somewhat arbitrarily changed.
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Gender isn't a biological fact. Sex is a biological fact. Gender is a grammatical construct later used as a euphemism for sex by repressed Americans. It was then further twisted into the current state of roles and identity.
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Gender roles have some basis in basic gender facts yes, but when many of these roles were formed our way of life was wildly different. At a basic level men were more suited to hunting and farming due to superior physical strength, while women were able to have babies.
Leadership positions in early societies were also gained due to physical strength and ability to fight, thus men have traditionally been in charge.
But some other things are totally arbitrary, for instance why should girls wear dresses and play
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And yet when left to their own devices most folks adhere to those very same gender roles.
No doubt there's some passive environmental pressure shaping these decisions, but those decisions are still being predicated by a biologic basis. Which isn't to say I have a problem with people 'breaking the mold' as it were, but if we're talking about population groups instead of individuals we have to recognize that these roles exist at least in part because of biological influences.
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You can't really claim someone was left to their own devices unless they were left totally isolated from biased influences. There are a lot of influences on a child right from birth, the parents will usually treat them according to their perception of how their gender should be treated, third parties will usually buy gender-biased gifts, not to mention external influences like television and other kids.
They only use male mice (Score:3, Insightful)
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Dumb nonscience writer who knows nothing about the drug development process is obvious.
Dumb slashdotter who knows nothing about biology is obvious.
How about (Score:5, Funny)
Transfemale mice? Or mice who identify as cats?
Of Mice and _Men_ (Score:2)
And therefore biased against women.
Scale of bias in sex groups (Score:1)
As someone who works on pharmaceutical data I thought this article could use some clarification.
The article makes it sound like using male only test groups is the norm. While I'm not involved in animal testing itself I am involved in analysing historical rest results. Recently I have been working with a large dataset of a few thousand studies performed by most of the major pharmaceutical companies. It contains something on the order of 30,000 animals making it possibly the largest single dataset of this typ
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Consider writing a response to the Science article. Those types of articles are usually rather light on actual numbers.
Gender is just a social construct (Score:5, Insightful)
Right? It's all the same, no difference whatsoever, and death to those who dare suggest otherwise. So why would entities who self-identify with the female gender need different medication from entities who self-identify with the male gender? How about the other 1467 genders, should there be specific pills for all of those? Have they at least included brown and white mice in their studies, or is medicine in fact the hotbed of racism I'm beginning to suspect it is? /sarc
(it's hard to be satirical when the real world is so unbelievably over the top...)
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No, gender is something you _are_, while sex is something you _do_.
Not that an AC would know about that...
THAT's your problem here? (Score:5, Funny)
And again, feminism fails to identify the real problem. Have you noticed that they absolutely exclusively test on white mice? Guess who really gets to suffer from side effects because their genetic and physiological percularities get underrepresented.
Feminists are all racists, I tell you!
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At least 60% of moderators understood the comment. My faith in /. is probably shaken but not destroyed yet.
Who came up with that? (Score:2)
Who came up with that silly line of reasoning? Someone trying to confirm the stereotype about women? I can understand that using only male test animals may introduce a bias in the research. But the reason for using male animals is completely practical. It has nothing to do with st
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Who came up with that silly line of reasoning? Someone trying to confirm the stereotype about women?
Someone trying to trigger people by introducing a complete non-sequitur.
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Who came up with that silly line of reasoning?
Fuck knows but it's a very pervasive myth.
Male mice and test animals are used because the rate at which you can breed replacement animals is proportional to the female population and only the female population. That is, the more of your female animals you kill off, the more you reduce the rate at which you can breed replacement animals. OTOH killing off your male animals doesn't affect the rate at which you can breed replacement animals. You only need to save a
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Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
If that were true women would have volunteered to enlist in droves and not arduously lobbied the government during every war to conscript men.
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If that were true
You think is't not? You'd prefer to live as a slave then?
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Me? no. Them? Yes.
What all women?
SJW n. One who is self-contradictory and in denial of objective reality.
I thought SJW was an insult to you? You now seem to be claiming to be one.
Yes, makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
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Men and women are NOT the same, regardless of what hyper-liberals and sociopathic feminists say we must believe. There has to be two research projects run on things that affect humans no - matter what the cost, one for men, and one for women. It is only logical. It is only right.
Ahh, but we have greatly differing legal costs. You're kind of cavalier about the costs of any legal action of any problem occurring during humans with regard to reproductive issues. The natural sympathy of juries to any problems with children, even if they aren't provably harmed by the drug under test, is a lose lose situation.
Valuation, variability, liability (Score:3)
1) males in a population are generally expendable, females less so until part reproductive age.
2) at least in humans, the changes in bodily systems linked to hormonal/reproductive cycles are profound in females, far simpler in males. If you're doing an experiment, you want to control for as many variables as possible to make your results clearer. Using women - where your results could vary wildly depending on whether it's the 14th of the month or the 20th of the month, whether she might actually be pregnant or not, etc would increase the costs, complexity, and length of drug trials exponentially.
3) let's not forget that women do get pregnant and don't realize it. If the new cold and flu medicine you're testing turns out to be the next thalidomide, how horrific would that be? (Setting aside entirely the likely financial liability.)
I know that the consequences of male-dominated testing are negative for women, but at a certain point even 21st century "woke" hand wringing and implications of institutional sexism runs into the hard, cold fact of the innate biological differences between people with xx chromosomes and people with xy.
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It's a very good point that's going to become even more relevant now.
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
time travel (Score:2)
Is there anyone else from an industry lab here who thought we were reading a paper from the 1980s?
Why do NIH researchers still do this? It's been the law in drug development since 1993 to have gender balanced studies. (The exceptions since '93 are very rare... Ambien was passed in '92).
Why are they dragging drug development into this? This simply isn't true for commercial efforts. In addition to being illegal, OF COURSE it would be incredibly stupid to ignore half the population.
sounds 'bout right (Score:3)
Weird (Score:2)
Brains vs species (Score:2)
So is the difference in male vs female mice greater than the difference between a mouse and a human in general?