Rethinking gender-specific medicine

The past 15 years have produced enormous advances in our understanding of the unique features of biological sex. Nevertheless, important and different tasks remain. One of these is to address the difficulties inherent in including premenopausal women in prospective, randomized trials characterizing the impact of new drugs and interventions. A second compelling mandate is to expand our knowledge of men using the same concentration on the unique features of male biology as we have used in studying women. The inclusion of men in our scientific investigations is a natural evolution of our development of the discipline of gender-specific medicine and will yield the same rich harvest as has our work in women's health.