Women's health continues to be negatively affected by the fact that most medical research is conducted on men, experts said at a recent UM symposium.
The field of neuroscience has a particularly male-centric track record, two speakers said in their presentations to about 85 attendees at the 2025 Equity Symposium organized by Women in Science: Development, Outreach and Mentorship (WISDOM).
"Over the past 50 years, neuroscience has exploded with discovery," said Dr. Jennifer Rabin, a clinical neuropsychologist and scientist at the University of Toronto.
"Most of this research has been carried out on the male brain, including male cells, male animals and male human participants."
Only a tiny number of imaging studies have examined the brain in relation to women's experiences, such as pregnancy, menopause and hormone therapy, Rabin said. "We know more about the surface of Mars than we do about women's brain health."
Rabin spoke about Alzheimer's disease, noting that nearly two-thirds of people with the disease are women, and research is needed on how menopause may play a part in its development.
The professor said she is happy to see the drug lecanemab approved in Canada for early-stage Alzheimer's, but the fact that it slowed cognitive decline by 43 per cent in male patients and only 12 per cent in female patients was buried in the supplemental material of the key research paper.
Neuroscientist Dr. Tamara Franklin from Dalhousie University also spoke at the Oct. 30 gathering held by WISDOM, an organization supported by the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences that connects and encourages women in science.
Franklin described how women's diseases receive scant research support in comparison to how prevalent they are. "Female-dominant diseases are underfunded, which means they're also understudied."
Emphasizing the need for sex and gender-based analysis in health research, Franklin said male rodents have been overwhelmingly favoured for lab studies, based on invalid assumptions that hormonal variability only affects females.
A study in Franklin's lab used female mice to explore whether women who experience stressors such as abuse during adolescence - a time of important brain development - are more likely to experience postpartum depression when they later give birth.
Comparing mouse mothers that had been subjected to stress as adolescents with a control group, Franklin's team found that the stressed mothers gained less weight for lactation, provided less maternal care to their babies, were less motivated to start grooming themselves, and ate less of a food that required effort to access.
Another strong theme at the symposium was that of engaging and collaborating with communities to advance health equity.
Speaker Dr. Purnima Madhivanan, a physician-scientist at the University of Arizona, described the extremely high rate of cervical cancer in India.
Madhivanan led a community-based research project, revealing that women's reasons for not being screened for the cancer included fear and stigma, as well as lack of autonomy because of needing their husbands' and families' permission.
With awareness of such barriers, successful screening programs have taken a community approach, integrating grassroots female peer education and mobile clinics.
UM speakers at the symposium included Dr. Marissa Becker, an infectious disease physician who is a professor in the College of Community and Global Health, and Dr. Josée Lavoie, dean of the College of Community and Global Health.
Becker described a UM study in Nairobi, Kenya that aims to improve HIV and sexually transmitted infection programs for sex workers by adopting a place-based approach, focusing on "risky places" rather than "risky people."
In partnership with local people, researchers are mapping locations where sex workers and those who use their services congregate, so that health services can be optimized.
Lavoie spoke about the Qanuinngitsiarutiksait program of research, which was developed in partnership with Inuit Elders to document patterns of health and other service use by Inuit living in Manitoba, or traveling to Manitoba from Nunavut.
The project is grounded in Inuit principles and validates Inuit ways of knowing. "If [our research] does not resonate with them, we got it wrong," Lavoie said about Inuit communities.
The symposium also included equity-themed research presentations by six students.
