Researchers say threats to federal research funding and President Donald Trump’s promise to eliminate any policy promoting “diversity, equity and inclusion” are threatening a decades-long effort to improve how the nation studies the health of women and queer people, or improve treatments for the medical conditions that affect them. Agency employees have been warned not to approve grants that include words such as  “women,” “trans” or “diversity.” 

That could mean halting efforts to improve the nation’s understanding of conditions that predominantly affect women, including endometriosis, menopause, infectious diseases contracted in pregnancy and pregnancy-related death. It could also stall research meant to treat conditions such as asthma, heart disease, depression and substance abuse disorders, which have different health implications for women versus men, and also have outsized impacts on LGBTQ+ people and people of color — often underresearched patients.

[...]

Jill Becker, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, uses rodent studies to better understand how sex differences can affect people’s responses to drug addiction and treatment. Her work has helped suggest that some forms of support and treatment can be more effective for male rats and others for female ones — a divide she hopes to interrogate to help develop appropriate treatments for people who are in recovery for substance use disorder, and, in particular, better treatment for cisgender men.   

Becker’s studies were singled out in a Senate hearing by Rand Paul, a Republican, who characterized it as the type of wasteful research that shouldn’t continue. Because she looks at sex differences, she anticipates that when her NIH funding finishes at the end of the year, the agency will no longer support her — a development that could eventually force her lab and others doing similar work to shut down entirely.

“If we no longer include women or females in our research, we’re obviously going to go back to not having answers that are going to be applicable to both sexes,” she said. “And I think that’s a big step backward.”

Read the full article on The 19th.