May 2021
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Excerpt below from the May 2021 Kaleidoscope column in The British Journal of Psychiatry (BJPsych). You can read the full column for free here
Women are not just small men. Last year, Caroline Criado Perez alerted the public to the very real dangers of male-centred bias in her bestselling book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. She laid bare that the male-as-default trope has deadly consequences: women are more likely to die in a car crash because the safety systems were designed for men's larger bodies and longer legs, and in medicine women are more likely to be misdiagnosed and have more negative side-effects of treatment than men. In their Nature Neuroscience piece,1 Rebecca Shansky and Anne Murphy zoom into the way this plays out in the preclinical neuroscience community and propose a way forward for real change and better translational research. Although there has been some progress over the past decade, single-sex animals studies are the norm, so much so that they are rarely justified, though when they are it is often by citing misconceptions.2 Despite this neglect of female subjects, extraordinary examples of fundamental sex differences continue to mount across behavioural, cellular and systems neuroscience that make this continued practice indefensible. For example, in male rats, studies of chronic stress paradigms used to inform post-traumatic stress disorder and depression research found structural and synaptic plasticity responses within key areas of the brain that accord with clinical neuroimaging studies. In females, the results were diametrically opposite, questioning our assumptions about the ‘fundamental’ brain responses to stress, and leading to a sigh of relief that therapeutic developments did not lead to treatment that exacerbated symptoms in women.