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NIH IS PLAYING FAST AND LOOSE WITH THE TRUTH
We've been reviewing some of the official documents from the
National
Institutes of Health, and compared these statements with the actual
facts.
What we found shocked even me. I've included full references at
the end
for persons who want to see them.
Ed
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What NIH Is Saying:
1. The Women's Health Initiative was established to "address
many of
the inequities in women's health research," such as the areas
of heart
disease, cancer, and osteoporosis. (WHI Backgrounder,
www.nhlbi.nih.gov/whi)
2. The Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH) was
established "in
response to a report by the U.S. General Accounting Office...that
women
were routinely excluded from medical research supported by NIH."
(Vivian Pinn, NIH News and Features, Fall 1997, p. 3)
3. "Historically, research studies were conducted only with
men."
(National Institute of Mental Health: Women Hold up Half the Sky.
Publication No. 99-4607)
What Our Research Reveals:
Our research demonstrates that these three statements are not
merely
exaggerated or one-sided; they are simply false. These are the facts:
CANCER
Cancer research has always favored women:
* An analysis of 1989 enrollees in NCI research reported only 43%
male
participation (1).
* A report from the Southwest Oncology Group revealed only 42%
were
males (2).
* The recent GAO report stated that men now compose only 29% of
participants in NCI research (3).
* A Medline search under the term "malignancy" for the
years
1966-1990 reveals 139 clinical trials for men and 191 for women.
* Sex-specific funding patterns reveal that prostate cancer has
lagged
behind breast cancer research by a 4:1 margin (4).
HEART DISEASE
A. 55% of participants in the early Framingham Heart Study were
female
(5).
B. An analysis of major hypertension studies conducted in the 1970s
and
1980s found that women made up nearly half of these studies (6).
C. A search of the Medline database for Heart Disease clinical trials
during the period 1966-1990 turns up 137 studies on men, and 78
studies
with women(7). In 1980, men's risk of dying from heart disease
was
280.4/100,000, while women's risk was only 140.3/100,000 (8). Men
were
at twice the risk of heart disease mortality, and represented the
high-
risk population.
When we consider that men have historically faced twice the risk of
death from heart disease, there is no evidence that overall, women
have
been underrepresented in heart disease research. As the Institute of
Medicine put it, "The literature is inconclusive about whether
women
have been excluded or importantly underrepresented in clinical
trials"
(9).
OSTEOPOROSIS
According to the Medline database, there were 18 female clinical
trials
on osteoporosis published 1966-1999, compared to only 7 studies for
men
(7). This represents more than a 2:1 disparity in women's favor.
MENTAL HEALTH
Mental health research sponsored by the NIH has long included women.
During the period 1966-1990, the number of clinical trials with women
has approximated the number of clinical trials with men (7).
The Underrepresentation of Men in NIH Research:
As documented above, men have been and continue to be
underrepresented in cancer research. Three other areas with
substantial
inequities affecting men's health are reproductive health,
contraception, and sex hormones.
An analysis of the NIH sex-specific budget 1988-1990 reveals that
women's health research received twice the funding of men's
health
research (10), which further discredits the argument that women have
been shortchanged by medical research.
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