Gay Health News – Are Gay People Excluded From Clinical Trials?
Concerns about gay discrimination
expanded from matrimony
or the military to a
new corner of society this week:
clinical trials for medical treatment.
LAUREN COX at ABC NEWS says Experts at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia worry that doctors may needlessly exclude gay men and lesbians from clinical trials that investigate a range of topics from cancer to diabetes and depression.
A study of 243 clinical trials related to couples and sexual function after various medical treatments showed that 37 trials explicitly excluded people in same-sex relationships, according to a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine Wednesday.
“The National Institutes of Health guidelines really require scientists to have sound scientific reasoning for why they need to restrict the study to one ethnic group or sex,” said Brian L. Egleston, lead author on the paper and an assistant research professor at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. “But there’s not this same level of oversight when it comes to gay and lesbian patients.”