WOMEN are used to being in the minority in many top jobs but may not realise they are also under-represented in trials of cancer drugs. This could be distorting our view of how well new drugs work and the side effects they produce.
at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her colleagues looked at 661 trials of cancer therapies, involving a total 1,096,098 participants, and found that for 6 out of 7 non-sex-specific cancer types, women were under-represented compared with the proportion that develop those cancers in the general population (Cancer, ).
Yet we know that gender affects the utility of diagnostic tests, preventative interventions, prognostic markers and therapeutics, says Jagsi. For example, women are more likely to experience side effects from the cancer drug carboplatin than men.
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