Gender Differences in Responses to Medication and Side Effects of Medication

Opioid abuse risk In recent years, there has been growing interest and increasing recognition that sex and gender may play a significant role in a person’s response to medication and should be an important part of individual prescribing. The reasons for sex differences in medication response are clearly multifactorial, encompassing a wide range of aspects from the effects of sex steroid hormones and organ physiology to psychological and sociocultural factors. It is becoming clear from human and animal studies that a number of endogenous neuroactive substances and receptors are influenced by hormonal manipulation, and that drugs routinely given for analgesia, for example, act upon these chemicals or receptors, as shown in Table I. Genetic factors may also play a part; for example, sex-specific differences have been found within the cytochrome p450 superfamily of enzymes involved in the metabolism of both therapeutic medications and endogenous compounds, including sex steroid hormones. Sex and gender differences are now being reported in the side effects of individual drugs.