Miami, United States.- Today just because we are women we have a 50% greater probability of having a misdiagnosis for heart attack; A lupus or immunological disease in women is complex and since it has not been studied enough, it puts us in a higher mortality condition compared to a man. Polycystic syndrome, which is a disease of only women, is usually misdiagnosed, because again, there is not enough testing and it is only taken as a moment where we “gain weight”, because we are eating too much and we treat it as a problem in the style of life, it is our fault.
In other data, 92% of the Women will have symptoms during menopausebut only two of them will be documented and treated, this is not addressed, contrary to an erection problem in men where it is documented in practically all cases. For every 100 menstruating women, only 30 of them have menopause according to the data. Could it be that the others died at some point? In reality they died for the health systems and for the indifference that exists for the majority of women’s illnesses, but the consequences of not looking at women’s illnesses are clearly latent, says Valentina Sartori, leader of the McKinsey Health Institute and global leader in the development of the firm’s sciences, during the first day of the Roche Press Day 2024 Women, Health and Equity.
To continue exemplifying the lag, only 7% of the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is allocated for specific research in rheumatoid arthritis, a very broad condition in the population of women; On the other hand, only 1% of the total research on conditions beyond oncological diseases is based specifically on women. Even within the ten conditions that contribute to more than half of the impact on the Gross Domestic Product of Latin American countries, three of them are exclusively for women: premenstrual syndrome, other gynecological diseases and cervical cancer, “if only we addressed this gap we would have 51 billion in productivity increase in GDP in Latin American countries, and correcting more than this 50% only falls on Mexico and Brazil.”
Sartori assures that we have to address the gap in access to health, it is about reimagining health with women at the center and collecting data, understanding that men and women are different, encouraging research, but also other factors .
Visibility to all other factors
Sthephanie Sassman, global women’s health leader for Genentech Roche, shares that for thousands of years medicine has been practiced and evidenced based on men, however “women are not small men.” She assures that just 4 decades ago medicine, specifically the FDA in the United States, talked about the inclusion of women at each level of clinical study, “so there is a lot to do, we can start with the main medications and but we do not have enough data with regarding the effects on women.”
This has to do with the fact that, “although women live on average longer than men, we spend more of our time in poor health and that time is the main time of our lives (productive age), this is also explained by “Inequity in workplaces and any other place, recognizing health gaps, is also recognizing lags in all areas of society.”
From her trenches, she said the idea is to develop innovative medications and diagnostics, first, to keep women healthy and then, to care for them when they get sick. “In 2020 Roche created a team to address these initiatives for women, what we found is that women have additional barriers and we have to analyze what those barriers are and understand them, for us women’s health means improving care, but also the conditions around them.”
Today, research and development focused on women is also essential, so that women’s journey is understood when it comes to talking about their health. “We need to rethink health equity and to do so we need more experts, research and counseling panels, as well as more women in medicine and in health and medicine leadership, because we ask different questions, we communicate differently and we think differently. different research.”
He spoke of the effort called XProject“where he not only speaks to women, he speaks to everyone, to health institutions, legislators, and all those who create health policies. The idea is to generate alliances and solutions to see women’s health as a whole, which is why we must all be involved.”
Political decisions
Lorice Scalise, first Latin American president of Roche Farma Brazil, is clear, “what we need beyond the solutions of science, –because science has also evolved, because we have technology and new diagnostics–, is to know where the solutions are. patients and under what conditions. These are political decisions that have been delayed (…) We need more concern and little by little we have the figures and data that are needed, for example, in Brazil from 2015 to 2023 we have registered 10 thousand deaths of women who were fatal victims of gender violence, but in 2022 alone, 26 thousand women did not have the possibility of a cure for breast cancer, the question is, are we not being indifferent to all these deaths?
He assures that these are other factors that we must bring to light: Distances, mobility, social mandates, gender, race, among others.
Fernando Ruiz, former minister of health in Colombia, vice minister of public health and former president of the board of directors of the Pan American Health Organization, also spoke on the topic: “For many years the way in which medicine and health services were They drove, they were thinking mainly about the health of men and only in addition they attended to women, now we are beginning to change this to really be able to correct the lag that we have in our countries.
Today, for example, 59% of the poorest quintile of women in 9 Latin American countries think that distance is a great barrier to accessing health services, being alone and without support is a factor, as well as not having money (74% of them) in order to pay for that service, joins the barriers.
“This provides an idea of the level of difficulties and how big the gap is that we have in Latin America to access services, and not just health, there are educational issues and social determinants that define care.” He concludes that “society needs to understand that gaps exist and that we must work on them. We are hopeful that something is beginning to change, 55% of the doctors who graduate from Latin American universities are women, this is good news and we have to ensure that these women can achieve specialties and develop projects for women’s health, which also see for public policies for them and by them.”