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| | | | |  | | While women's health tends to focus more on pregnancy and breast cancer, doctors and researchers say they want to see the field broaden. (Chinnapong/Shutterstock) | Amina Zafar | Despite a rule that requires sex and gender to be considered when funding medical research in Canada, new research shows the number of grants for women's health studies hasn't budged in five years, something doctors say has serious implications for their patients.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has mandated the inclusion of sex and gender as criteria for awarding grants since 2010. Despite that, a group of researchers found in 2023 that less than six per cent of Canadian health research funding went to women's health. Now, their new study is also analyzing how narrow the field of women's health research is.
While women's health is currently more focused on areas like pregnancy and breast and gynecological cancers, doctors and researchers say they want to see the field broaden to include other conditions, like migraine headaches, chronic pelvic pain and fibromyalgia, which studies show are more common among women, but garner less research funding.
Dr. Tania Di Renna, the medical director of the Toronto Academic Pain Medicine Institute, who works as an anesthesiologist at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, says she promises her patients she'll study their conditions with the goal of finding the source of their chronic pelvic pain, something she says is important, because traditionally, health-care professionals have brushed off women's pain.
Di Renna says that's partly because before 1993, women were rarely included in clinical trials due to concerns that pregnancy could interrupt the study, or that trials could pose potential dangers to the fetus. Di Renna also notes that medical researchers would even leave female animals out of studies. | | |  | | Dr. Tania Di Renna says that historically, women were rarely included in clinical trials. (Mary-Ellen Bertram) | | | Lack of clinical trials for women
These concerns trace back to the use of thalidomide in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The morning sickness drug had debilitating effects on babies in multiple countries, including Canada.
Di Renna sees this lack of female subjects in clinical trials play out when it comes time to prescribe medications for her patients suffering with chronic pelvic pain. She says when she prescribes medications, her patients often tell her about certain side effects they experience.
"Women tell me that, 'I can't take this drug. It makes me nauseous. It makes me gain weight. It makes me sedated.' [Women] have so many things going against us already, and now even the medications that are there to treat you are going against you."
Due to policy and social changes in the 1990s, research into women's health has increased, but Di Renna says there's more work to be done.
For example, the way women respond to opioid pain medications differs from men, but why this is remains unclear, Di Renna said.
In 2022, a review of studies on sex-related differences in response to medications concluded that opioids seemed to produce better pain relief in women, especially when administered for a few days. But responses also seemed inconsistent, with factors like the type of treatment, menopausal status and characteristics of the pain all contributing.
This kind of uncertainty and lack of research means physicians may not be able to find the cause of chronic pain for female patients. In those cases, Di Renna says "we really have to move on and focus on how you can live with a good quality of life."
Other physicians say this may include better medications to treat pain, or other methods of pain management such as physio, meditation, or even heating pads for cramps.
Migraines are an example of a condition that research shows impacts more women than men.
The prevalence of migraines is the same for girls and boys before puberty, according to Dr. Peter Goadsby, a neurologist in headache disorders at King's College Hospital in London. But doctors have observed that after the first period, women experience migraines three times more frequently than men, and that migraines typically decline after menopause.
Despite this, the authors of a new Canadian preprint found a single female-specific grant application to CIHR for the study of how migraines affect women over 13 years.
Overall, Liisa Galea and her team found female-specific research funding has not changed since 2020, staying at about seven per cent.
The study, which hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, also suggests that the research conducted in women's health largely focuses on breast and gynecologic cancers or pregnancy. They argue the field of women's health research should be much broader.
Galea, who holds the Treliving Family Chair in Women's Mental Health at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, led the new analysis, as well as a similar submission to the House of Commons health committee in 2024.
She says she experienced pushback herself when she applied for CIHR grants to examine the influence of pregnancy history on the risk of Alzheimer's disease. Galea says she was told that she needed to add biological males to her study.
"Unless you're Arnold Schwarzenegger in a particular movie, you can't get a male pregnant. But that was a criticism."
Read more on why medical researchers say they should be "allowed to just study females." | | | 'It was fantastic': How a new therapy is pushing the boundaries for Parkinson's patients
|  | Medication and deep brain stimulation surgery have helped Fabio Dwyer resume much of his life and career after he learned he has Parkinson's disease. (Turgut Yeter/CBC) | Musician Fabio Dwyer first felt the symptoms during a performance in 2017.
He couldn’t hold his guitar pick in the correct position. Then he noticed his right arm wouldn’t swing naturally. Just a few months later, extreme tremors led him to the hospital and a diagnosis — Parkinson’s disease.
“It was like a big hole, deep hole, black hole was opening up under my feet and I was falling, like non-stop,” he said.
Now the Toronto man is part of a Canadian trial at the University Health Network to see if a new device can address his lingering issues and change the way we treat neurological conditions.
“I hope this is going to bring even more to my treatment.”
Read more from CBC Health's Marcy Cuttler in this interactive. | | | | | Cross-Canada health news from CBC | | |  | Nursing assistant describes 'horrible' bedsore of patient who sought assisted death after ER stay | CBC Montreal | | | | | New Brunswick has no mystery neurological disease, scientific study concludes | CBC New Brunswick | | | | |  | | Mother urges parents to vaccinate kids after daughter's measles death | | 2:19 | | | | | THE NATIONAL | VIDEO | Measles may start like a bad cold — with symptoms like a high fever and cough — but in rare cases, it turns deadly. For one child, complications emerged about a decade later, robbing her of speech, movement and, eventually, her life. | | | | | Trending research | | | | Immunogenicity and safety of influenza and COVID-19 multicomponent vaccine in adults ≥50 Years: A randomized clinical trial | JAMA | | | | | Adolescent cardiorespiratory fitness and risk of cancer in late adulthood: A nationwide sibling-controlled cohort study in Sweden | PLOS Medicine | | | | | Antibiotics in the global river system arising from human consumption | PNAS Nexus | | | | | THE BIG NUMBER | 24% | Asthma-related visits to the emergency department increased by up to 24 per cent during unprecedented wildfire smoke in 2023 in Ontario, a new study suggests.
During the first wave of smoke in early June, asthma-related ER visits spiked, researchers reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Then during a later wave of wildfire smoke in late June, there were fewer asthma visits.
Why isn't known but the study's authors said possible explanations include protective effects from preventative medications prescribed during the first episode, public awareness such as air quality advisories and people minimizing exposure, such as staying indoors and using air filters.
| | | | | Stories we found interesting this week | | | | Talk therapy is up, and use of psych meds without therapy is down, a study finds | NPR | | | | | Smallpox used to kill millions of people every year. Here’s how humans beat it. | Vox | | | | | | | | |  | May 8
What do we know about methylene blue?
A new miracle cure-all has been making the rounds on social media, promising improved mood and cognition. Some TikTok videos even suggest the synthetic dye methylene blue could be used to treat cancer.
Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill's Office for Science and Society, explains there’s little evidence to suggest methylene blue is useful outside of very specific circumstances.
Play on CBC Listen
| | | |  | May 10 - 11
The power of "lived expertise" in substance abuse recovery
At the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre for men in Winnipeg, over 90 per cent of the staff are in recovery from substance abuse themselves.
In the second of a two-part series, we learn how staffers like Terrence Morrin use "lived expertise" to create a circle of recovery. He first came to the centre as a participant two years ago, after detoxing on the floor of a prison cell. Today, he's helping other guys like him walk the walk.
Tune in on CBC Listen | | | | Thanks for reading! You can email us any time at secondopinion@cbc.ca with your comments, questions, feedback or ideas.
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