Who’s Missing From Breast Cancer Trials? Men, Says the F.D.A.

I applaud all efforts to include diverse samples in research, especially when federally-funded (i.e., with our tax dollars). Nearly 10% of people are left-handed and they are routinely excluded from psychology and neuroscience research because they are "atypical" and increase the variability in the data. Strange logic when you stop to think about. Left-handers unite!

Relax ladies. It is just one article.

The article quotes a doctor: “It’s so frustrating in clinic to see patients and say, ‘Well, we don’t really know — the drugs have been tested in women. We think it should work in men, but there’s no real evidence to back that up....’” You know what? I hear some version of this All. The. Time. "We really don't know--the drug has been tested in menopausal women. We don't know what the effect would be in premenopausal women." "We really don't know--the drug has been tested in people who completed a full course of neoadjuvant chemotherapy. We don't know what the effect would be in people who did not complete the full course." "We really don't know--the drug has been tested in people with Stage I carcinoma. We don't know what the effect would be in people with Stage II carcinoma." Et cetera. There are so many factors. Gender is just one of them. Sure, expand the research to include men, along with every other variable you can think of. Please.

Maybe some type of cure will finally emerge if the focus is on men.

So, the research shoe is finally on the other foot!

Female breasts are very different from male breasts, have a look. Milk ducts.

So we suddenly care about bias in healthcare when it’s a tiny number of men who are left out? Let’s work on how women and POC are under represented in literally every other medical issue first.

Thank YOU NYT! Thank you for recent articles: Men and Breast Cancer and Military Men and Sexual Assault. I've been an NYT subscriber for about 2 yrs and enjoy many articles. I think men are left out of your news coverage and gazillions of other periodicals do the same. Women need the press they are given by all, due to their many needs and problems/issues over the last 'how many years. Of course it is a good thing that they buy periodicals. As you know their are women and then feminist power- which are powerful groups in our past and present climate. Women have been discriminated against causing pain and suffering for a long, long, long time. Men also but differently than women. In the meantime MEN have been left out of news from most all sources on their issues. I have been wanting to write NYT with these ideas for several years. I hope and pray you will continue to support men and young men , writing about the problems and hardships they also face. (Unemployment, education, health problems, relationships, etc.) thanks again. Please note the opinion below which proves my point. The issue is women and men need support in same and different ways. Anger against men- for their needs does help solve 'gender disparity'. Men have issues also. Men and women need to work together to solve mutual problems and NYT has a role to play in this struggle. Support men in more articles about their needs. willyon46.mich.

It’s funny how an article about science and medicine becomes a political hot potato. Ladies, the answer isn’t to ignore men; the goal should be for both genders to receive testing and treatment. It almost sounds like you’re happy some men are dying!

Odd to see the politicized comments responding to this piece. The goal should be to get the best possible treatment for everyone. If clinical trials are feasible for men (and they may not be practical, given the rarity of male breast cancer), they should be done. If not, at least men should get the standard of care as extrapolated from trials on women.

Oh please. Every other medical trial has focussed only on men. Let's put resources in studying diseases that profoundly affect women--heart disease, to name just one--in which the studies have excluded women for decades.

I believe it should be known that all initial breast cancer studies were completed exclusively on men. Those findings were then extrapolated to women. I don't think men are under studied in this case.

While I am glad to see testing done in this area, typical medications for heart attacks (like aspirin and others) don’t work on women. Women are far more likely to die from a heart attack that men, but what about this one area of a woman's disease that can impact men 1% of the time? Women have heart attacks far more often than men get breast cancer. Amazing how quickly a gender disparity issue was flipped to benefit men. Hope my doctor can recognize my non-male biased heart attack symptoms and send me home with a diagnosis of stress. But it is that 1% of men that matters and gets the press.

Let’s add men to the breast cancer study when women are proportionately represented in all the other drug and medical device testing throughout the United States. That should provide incentive to the testing industry.

It is true that men often do not recognize symptoms they are having may indicate breast cancer My best childhood buddy died of breast cancer, after years of horrible suffering. One time he was talking to my mother and casually mentioned "look, my breasts are growing". My mother immediately said "you have to see a doctor immediately". Yes, the diagnosis came, but the cancer was already well embedded. He was not even 50 when he died.

They’re so worried about men, with the miniscule incidence rate...Yet women are barely studied for things that affect them on far larger levels? In almost Every story I read in this section (and health studies elsewhere) the sample is always men, and barely women. What a joke.

I was surprised to read there was an aggressive push to include more women in clinical trials. It still seems that most medical studies I read about are done on men.