Invisible Women: where have I seen that before? 🤔

Hellooooo GFPs! And thank you for all your lovely emails and advice to take it easy after Covid. I am constitutionally incapable of following said advice, but I have tried to tone it down a bit. Also this week I am on holiday so I’m taking it easy there. Sort of. But in any case, you won’t be getting a newsletter next Monday – you can’t get mad, you told me to take it easy!

In other news, this reaction from the lead author of last week’s gender data gap made my week:

We live to serve, Ms Parker – and, thank YOU in turn for your service 💪

Asthma is a female-dominated condition: there are over 262 million people globally who have asthma — and 136 million of them are female.

As well as being more likely to have asthma in the first place, women suffer with more severe symptoms. They also experience “a significantly higher higher numbers of asthma attacks,” from which they are more likely than men to be hospitalised – and to die.

In fact women with asthma are twice as likely as men with asthma to die from an asthma attack. That’s according to a report by the UK’s leading asthma charity Asthma + Lung UK, baldly called “Asthma is worse for women,” which is calling for sex differences in asthma incidence and outcomes to be investigated. Apparently, despite these marked sex disparities, no one really seems to have thought this worth looking into.

One of the most interesting (to me) findings of the report is the strong impact of female hormone fluctuations on women with asthma, as indicated by symptom variations correlated with the menstrual cycle, with pregnancy, with menopause, and with hormonal birth control and HRT.

I find this interesting because it makes me think of my favourite* excuse researchers give for why they sadly *this hurts me more than it hurts you face 😢* must exclude messy women from their nice neat studies: “the menstrual cycle will interfere with the results!!!!11!”

Yes it will. YES, IT WILL. SO STUDY IT, BECAUSE IT WILL BE “INTERFERING” IRL AAAAAAAAAARRRGGGHHH!

According to the report, 20-25% of women with asthma have premenstrual asthma – and 68% of these women have previously been hospitalised. This, of course, hasn’t stopped (male) doctors dismissing women who have noticed a pattern:

Hmmm…medical professionals dismissing women who notice a pattern between symptoms and their menstrual cycle. Where have I seen that before?

For women with perimenstrual asthma, oral contraception has been found to reduce symptoms and improve pulmonary function – which I also find interesting, because when we DO manage to convince researchers to include women in research it’s usually on pain of death agreeing to take hormonal birth control.

So…how on earth are we suppose to know what impact hormonal birth control may or may not have if we almost exclusively study women who are on it and act like it’s a totally neutral state of being rather than a hormonal intervention that may or may not interact with whatever drug happens to be being tested at the time?

30% of women also report that their asthma gets worse during pregnancy – while a quarter report that it gets better. This seems to correlate with how severe the asthma is: mild asthma seems more likely to improve during pregnancy while “more severe forms of the disease frequently worsen.”

There are other sex differences in how asthma presents in women, for example the obesity-asthma association is also stronger among women than men. In fact, the report explains

And again…

The report calls for large-scale funding to investigat these differences, and calls, brace yourselves, GFPs, for “all major asthma research groups […] to re-analyse their datasets by sex”

[…]

*by favourite I mean:

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GFP Suzy writes in relation to last week’s gender data gap of the week (RELAX-in), to recommend Jennis a tracking app that aligns your workouts to your cycle:

Would love to hear from GFPs who’ve tried it out!

That’s it! Until next time, my dear GFPs….xoxoxo