Sex inclusion in basic research drives discovery

Multifaceted origins of sex differences in the brain

“…animal studies) has severely hampered the applicability and reproducibility of basic neuroscience research over the past several decades. Moreover, the withdrawal of 8 out of 10 drugs from the USA market between 1997 and 2000 was, in part, owing to more severe adverse effects in women (reviewed in [5]). Thus, as has been proposed by many others, it is essential to the shared mission of highquality and impactful science that research on sex differences be expertly conducted, accurately interpreted and appropriately conveyed to the lay public and media.…”

How does sex matter? Behavior, stress and animal models of neurobehavioral disorders

“…Notwithstanding the notion that an animal model has validity inasmuch as it is similar to a modeled human disease (Belzung and Lemoine, 2011), most preclinical biomedical research does not take into consideration sex as an experimental variable (Beery and Zucker, 2011;Yoon et al, 2014;McCullough et al, 2014;Klein et al, 2015). The evident paradox is that although women are more vulnerable to several stress-related mental disorders, such as major depression and general anxiety, the vast majority of animal studies (both behavioral and neurochemical) related to models of mental disorders are carried out in male animals only (Blanchard et al, 1995a,b;Palanza, 2001;Zucker and Beery, 2010).…”

In Vitro Toxicology Testing: It’s Time to Report the Sex of Cells

“…In light of evidence taken from numerous fields indicating that males are routinely used more than females as test subjects, [1][2][3] and the resulting poor outcomes of such practice, 4,5 a conversation on balancing the sex of sample sets is not a new one. In a 2014 meta-analysis of nearly 300 studies, Prendergast and colleagues discovered that females have erroneously been considered more variable owing to their estrous cycle; instead, males were found to be more inconsistent under some experimental conditions.…”