Basmah Safdar, MD, is Norma Weinberg Spungen and Joan Lebson Bildner Professor of Women’s Health Research, professor of emergency medicine at Yale School of Medicine, and director of Women’s Health Research at Yale. This is a lightly edited excerpt from her interview on the Health & Veritas podcast, episode 199, “Why Women Experience Illness Differently.” Listen to the whole interview to learn about the need for more women’s health research, what has been discovered so far, and where the field is headed next.
Q+A
Quick Question: What is the Next Era of Women’s Health Research?
What is the next era of women’s health research?
Basmah Safdar, MD: Women’s health really came into recognition a little more than 30 years ago. And that was in the context that the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] in 1977 had said women of childbearing age should not be included in clinical trials, because of the thalidomide controversy. And so, for about 15 years, systematically, women were not included.
Someone recognized that, as a result—because women were being excluded—we were not seeing data relevant to women’s health. And so, in the early 90s, the [National Institutes of Health] created the Office of Research on Women’s Health and it was the first time that the NIH mandated including women in clinical trials.
Fast-forward to 2016. [NIH leaders] Janine Clayton and Francis Collins mandated the inclusion of male and female cell lines in animal research. And for the last 30 years, we at least now have sex-specific data related to a range of diseases.
For instance, now we know that men and women can have different types of heart attacks and you can have different classifications. Disease states once bulked together under “syndrome X,” because we didn’t understand them, were actually due to different biology, we just didn’t have the tools to diagnose them. Now we have some tools to diagnose them, but in very specialized centers.
So how do we take those tools, now that we understand the biology, and turn them into diagnostics, and prognostics, and therapeutics, that we can offer to the masses?
I think that’s where the work is. That is, I think, the second phase of where women’s health research is, taking good science and matching to it clinical needs to accelerate its translation. And the good news and the promising news is that it is being recognized, and investments are being made. The past year has seen some very promising advances, but much more work is ahead.
Health & Veritas is hosted by Yale School of Medicine’s Howard Forman, MD, MBA, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, and Harlan Krumholz, MD, SM, Harold H. Hines Jr. Professor of Medicine (Cardiology).
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