Researchers in the Boston University School of Medicine will continue to study how women may require different care than men for the same diseases with a renewed five-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
“[The NIH has] determined that understanding how the care for women should be different from the care for men is good for both men and women,” said Dr. Karen Freund, an associate director in the Women’s Health Interdisciplinary Research Center. “This should be a priority.”
Freund, who has been a MED faculty member since 1989, will be the lead investigator of the study and will work closely with Dr. Rebecca Sillman.
“We have a lot of information around to know that sex matters,” Freund said. “It can be differences in health-developmental processes, how drugs are distributed in the body, side effects to various drugs, how different health problems are evidenced by men and women and differences in how they respond to treatment.”
More than half of the institutions that held the grant previously were not awarded a renewal, Freund said.
“It’s actually a real bonus to Boston University that we not only got the grant funded the first time, but that we were successful in getting it refunded, demonstrating the success we had in the first five years with the program,” Freund said.
Previous scholars have focused on racial, gender and ethnic health disparities in medicine. Research has looked into why black women are less likely to develop breast cancer but more likely to die from it, as well as why women are more likely than men to get Alzheimer’s disease.
Junior faculty members who have finished their graduate degrees and doctoral training can apply for positions in the project until Oct. 12, according to the MED website.
“This just gives us an opportunity to train the next generation of leaders in women’s health, and it’s very exciting for me,” Freund said. “I spend a lot of my time mentoring and supervising young trainees and junior faculty, and it’s really one of the real pleasures in my career right now to do so.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
