At just 36, Jen O’Neill was not considered an emergency department priority for treatment for a suspected heart attack.
O’Neill, who had given birth 11 months previously, had none of the traditional precursors for a heart attack – no family history, no high blood pressure, diabetes or high cholesterol levels – but her troponin levels confirmed the problem was in her heart.
When she was finally taken for a scan, she received a diagnosis of spontaneous coronary artery dissection, which occurs when there is a tear in the artery that supplies blood to the heart. More than nine out of 10 Scad cases are women, often soon after they have a baby.
But with no research into the best course of medication for the condition, O’Neill was given the same course of blood thinners and beta blockers used for more traditional heart attack patients.
The blood thinners made her periods extremely heavy and gave her awful fatigue. They were also meant to prevent further heart attacks. But O’Neill went on to suffer another two.
“We don’t have kind of a gold standard treatment of Scad … because my understanding is a lot of the research is based on males, because they are the traditional heart attack patients,” O’Neill said.
Now, a new national research centre will be dedicated to improving the lack of knowledge about how sex and gender affects the risk, detection and treatment of many health conditions – and translating that research into policies and practice.
The Centre for Sex and Gender Equity in Health and Medicine will launch on Wednesday at the University of New South Wales, an initiative of the George Institute for Global Health, the Australian Human Rights Institute at the University of New South Wales, and Deakin University, with support from the Victorian Department of Health and the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes.
Prof Robyn Norton, the founding director of the George Institute, said: “Our knowledge about health has overwhelmingly come from studies done with male cells, male animals, male humans used as standard in the laboratory, and that’s got to change.”
Norton said she and her colleagues had realised Australia was “really quite behind” other countries such as Canada, US, Japan, Korea and many European countries who had established centres focused on trying to understand the role of sex and gender on health equity.
The evidence base underpinning healthcare was one of the five domains identified to describe gender bias in healthcare in a report released this month by the National Women’s Health Advisory Council, formed in late 2022 to address medical misogyny and chaired by the assistant minister for health, Ged Kearney.
Through research and advocacy, the new centre will address gender bias in health and medicine that leads to poorer health outcomes, evidence gaps and inefficient health spending for women, intersex people, trans and gender-diverse people, and in some cases also men.
For example, the data for osteoporosis – which is viewed predominately as a disease of older women – shows that men are rarely treated for the condition and have a higher mortality rate than women from its complications.
“There’s an opportunity we hope with the centre to really look at improving health outcomes and health equity, frankly, for all Australians,” Norton said.
The centre will have two hubs – one based at UNSW and another at Deakin. Researchers at both universities will be engaged in studies addressing inequities in health but the centre will also serve as a resource for outside organisations and individuals around the country.
Norton said the centre would also focus on the translation of research findings into policy and practice, through working with governments, healthcare providers and the business community.
