Pulse Brain · Growing Health Evidence Index
Peer-reviewed

An analysis of neuroscience and psychiatry papers published from 2009 and 2019 outlines opportunities for increasing discovery of sex differences

Rebecca K. Rechlin, Tallinn F. L. Splinter, Travis E. Hodges, Arianne Albert, Liisa A.M. Galea

Nature Communications · 2022

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Summary

Sex differences exist in many neurological and psychiatric diseases, but these have not always been addressed adequately in research. In order to address this, it is necessary to consider how sex is incorporated into the design (e.g. using a balanced design) and into the analyses (e.g. using sex as a covariate) in the published literature. We surveyed papers published in 2009 and 2019 across six journals in neuroscience and psychiatry. In this sample, we find a 30% increase in the percentage of papers reporting studies that included both sexes in 2019 compared with 2009. Despite this increase, in 2019 only 19% of papers in the sample reported using an optimal design for discovery of possible sex differences, and only 5% of the papers reported studies that analysed sex as a discovery variab

Source type
Peer-reviewed study
DOI
10.1038/s41467-022-29903-3
Catalogue ID
SNmojbikzc-vvudw2
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