RESEARCH ABOUT WOMEN'S BRAINS LOADING....

By Winna Xia

male pre-clinical studies. This leads to health professionals and scientists making dangerous assumptions about how similar peoples' bodies react to TBIs regardless of gender. Many past studies show that biologically female and male brains are very different from one another in size to the way neurons are wired (Brizendine 2006; Ingalhalikar 2014).

One of the main reasons women have not been historically included in the research is due to the 'complexity' of the ovarian cycle.

Yet, even though past years have failed to accommodate this, half of the human population is affected by the ovarian cycle. Even though it is another independent variable, it is not one that can be brushed away.

In recent years, there have been efforts to level this inequity in research. In 2017, there was the “Understanding TBI in Women” workshop co-hosted by NIH, the Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, and the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center in an effort to identify “knowledge gaps, best practices, and target populations relevant to research on sex differences and women with TBI." (Mollayeva and Colantonio 2020)

Additionally, there is new ongoing research (Armitage 2022, Valera 2021) focused on bridging these knowledge gaps and finding the why behind the differences between male and female responses to therapeutical treatments in intracranial injuries like TBI. TBI remains a consistent issue that has few therapeutic treatments for both males and females. However, with more equitable research and time, there is a possible therapeutic treatment that will work for everyone on the horizon.

Sources

Armitage, Hanae “Why Women Have a Tougher Time Recovering from Brain Injuries.” Stanford Medicine Magazine, 22 Sept. 2022, https://stanmed.stanford.edu/brain-injury-recovery-more-difficult-womenthan-men/

Brizendine, Louann. The Female Brain. United States, Morgan Road Books, 2006

Ingalhalikar, Madhura, et al. “Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain ” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 111,2(2014): 823-8. doi:10.1073/pnas.1316909110

Castanon, Laura “Most Biomedical Research Is Done on Male Animals That's a Public Health Problem.” Northeastern Global News, 30 Mar. 2022

Mollayeva, Tatyana, and Colantonio, Angela “Sex, Gender, and Traumatic Brain Injury: Implications for Better Science and Practice.” Brain Injury Association of America, 7 July 2020, https://www.biausa.org/publicaffairs/media/sex-gender-and-traumatic-brain-injury-implications- forbetter-science-and-practice.

Valera, Eve M et al “Understanding Traumatic Brain Injury in Females: A State-of-the-Art Summary and Future Directions.” The Journal of head trauma rehabilitation vol. 36,1 (2021):E1-E17. doi:10 1097/HTR 0000000000000652