Apparently, the lab rat business has been male dominated for some time. Medical research and neuroscience have kept a long tradition of excluding female lab animals from experiments because of concerns that their cycling hormones would confound results. But according to news that broke ysterday, NIH is about to change that. This week's Nature carried an announcement that NIH is issuing new rules to end sex bias in the use of lab animals.
The Nature paper was authored by NIH honchos Francis Collins and Janine Clayton. A smattering of coverage followed, most of it explaining why scientists had relied more on male animals – which in itself will be news to most lay readers. The stories also listed various sex differences in the ways humans experience health problems and react to drugs.
We learned that women are more likely to develop MS, react differently to the sleep drug Ambien, and get less of a benefit from statins, for example.
One looming question was not answered by any of these stories: Is there any evidence these human sex differences would have been uncovered earlier if scientists used a mix of male and female animals? There’s an assumption built into the stories that fixing the animal imbalance will prevent the medical community from continuing to be blindsided by human sex differences.
The New York Times put the story on the front page. Author Roni Caryn Rabin detailed some of the more serious ways medicine has failed to account for sex differences in humans. A particularly interesting example involved addictions:
Jill Becker, a senior research scientist at the University of Michigan who studies gender differences in addiction, has found that women increase their drug use much more rapidly than men and that the hormone estradiol plays a critical role in the escalation, especially during ovulation.
Nonetheless, researchers studying escalating drug use in rats and mice rely almost entirely on males, she said.
A story on sex differences and statins appeared in last Tuesday’s Times as well. It had some important caveats about the cholesterol-lowering drugs, suggesting that healthy women on statins may risk side effects and derive little benefit. But there was no indication that the use of female lab animals would have prevented the delay in discovering this.
The Verge ran a story by Arielle Duhaime-Ross, which includes an interesting interview with a pain researcher explaining that scientists had long assumed female animals were more variable, but evidence is suggesting it’s not true:
Jeffrey Mogil, a pain researcher at McGill University in Montreal who regularly works with animal subjects, says that researchers avoid using female animals because many believe that female test subjects introduce more variability in their data.
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Paul Baskin weighed, and included one skeptical note – an excerpt from a 2010 Science interview with NIH’s then-director of research in women’s health Vivian Pinn.
In the 2010 article in Science, Dr. Pinn spoke skeptically of the idea. "I cannot foresee how a blanket policy requiring the use of male and female animals could be implemented or would work," she told the journal. "The research and how it’s designed has to be based on the science of what is being studied and the availability of models." Dr. Pinn did not respond to attempts by The Chronicle to locate her for comment on Wednesday's announcement.
Reuters has this story by Will Dunham.
And at Bloombergview.com, Leonid Bershidksy opted to combine the news about more jobs for female lab mice with the sudden ousting of New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson. He seems to get the science part right at least, and adds some interesting details about Abramson’s complaints over unequal pay. The stories weren’t really related, but it was hard for those of us who read this morning's Times readers not to notice the juxtaposition.
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