Two weeks ago my dad excitedly called to talk about a segment on 60 Minutes that just aired. "It was real neat!" he exclaimed, never failing to be intrigued by the journalism on one of his favorite shows.
Naturally, I headed over to CBS News to watch the segment. What was discovered is that females taking Ambien (zolpidem) wake up in the morning with 45% more of the drug left in their body than males. It has become the only drug on the market that discriminates between males and females for dosing amounts. This has huge implications on the foundations of modern medicine.
Since today's medicine is based on research, and that research is based on experiments on males, we do not know much about how treatments effect women or, as with heart attacks, how diseases progress in women. The news segment provided a couple of examples of why it is so important to understand this difference. The conclusion is that all pharmaceuticals probably need to be retested to account for this sex difference but, unfortunately, that is a huge undertaking that will never happen.
As a medical practitioner, it is important to keep this new knowledge in the back of our minds. Watch out for side effects and unusual disease presentations in female patients.
Since today's medicine is based on research, and that research is based on experiments on males, we do not know much about how treatments effect women or, as with heart attacks, how diseases progress in women. The news segment provided a couple of examples of why it is so important to understand this difference. The conclusion is that all pharmaceuticals probably need to be retested to account for this sex difference but, unfortunately, that is a huge undertaking that will never happen.
As a medical practitioner, it is important to keep this new knowledge in the back of our minds. Watch out for side effects and unusual disease presentations in female patients.
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