Finally, Women's Studies

Georgetown Joins Long-Delayed National Effort to Plumb The Medically Relevant Differences Between Her and Him

Theresa Parrish, an HIV-positive liver transplant recipient from Missouri, travels to Georgetown University each year for a study measuring the rate at which women absorb HIV drugs in their bloodstreams. The new Center for the Study of Sex Differences is encouraging such studies. (Mark Schiefelbein - for The Washington Post)

Theresa Parrish is certain there are differences between men and women that go far deeper than sex organs and who's in charge of the remote.

If Parrish didn't firmly believe that, the disabled, HIV-positive liver transplant recipient wouldn't journey all the way from Springfield, Mo., every year to participate in a Georgetown University study that's attempting to spotlight those differences and how they affect health and disease.

Parrish, 51, makes the trip to get poked and prodded and questioned by a team of researchers focusing on the rate at which women absorb HIV drugs into their bloodstreams. The results are regularly compared with those from a similar study on men that's taking place at Johns Hopkins University.

"I hope we'll be able to find out if we're underdosing or overdosing women and make the adjustments they need," said Parrish, referring to the fact that up until the early 1990s, most clinical drug trials were done on men only, which left doctors unsure whether they should be offering different doses to women.

The HIV drug research on women is just one of the studies going on under the aegis of Georgetown's new Center for the Study of Sex Differences, which will officially launch next month.

The hope, said Kathryn Sandberg, director of the new center and a professor of nephrology and hypertension at Georgetown, is that the center will encourage collaboration among researchers across myriad areas of study, leading to a better understanding of the way sex influences health, disease and aging. From there, improving detection and treatment for both men and women should follow.

"There aren't enough evidence-based studies out there on why men and women have such different experiences with diseases like AIDS, cancer, diabetes and renal failure," said Sandberg. "We want to help facilitate researchers who think they may be onto some new insights about these diseases but just don't have the resources to study both males and females."

Known health-related sex differences include the following:

• Men don't live as long as women in almost all societies studied;

• Women are more likely to develop lung cancer when exposed to the same amount of smoke as men;