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New research into clinical trials in the USA has found that lesbian and gay participants are sometimes being deliberately excluded from participation.

The results of the study by biostatisticians Brian Egleston, Roland Dunbrack, Jr and Michael Hall of the Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia was published last week in a letter to The New England Journal of Medicine.

The researchers looked into 80,000 trials funded by the National Institutes of Health and several other government agencies, as well as those funded by private businesses, and discovered that 15% of trials explicitly excluded lesbian and gay people, mainly those relating to sexual dysfunction. One of the trials, however, focused on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The researchers investigated trials using such terms such as “erectile dysfunction,” “couples” and “hypoactive”. To ensure that there was not a pattern of exclusionary language that they had missed, they also investigated more than a thousand trials with the search term “asthma”, and not one of the asthma studies excluded lesbian or gay men.

Eglestone expressed his concern about this kind of discrimination to the journal, stating: “Most gay and lesbian patients are probably unaware that their sexual orientation is being used as a screening factor for clinical trial participation. This is a potentially significant issue, both for patients and the medical research community.” He is encouraging those who conduct clinical trials to consider whether excluding lesbian and gay patients is scientifically necessary.

Posted in: Health |