Gender Bias in den Gesundheitswissenschaften — ein Thema für die epidemiologische Allergieforschung?

There is growing interest in public health research on gender-associated inequalities in morbidity and mortality and their determinants. It has been demonstrated that gender bias exists in severalfields of medical research due to androcentricity, overgeneralization, gender insensitivity, and double standards. Therefore, the need of gendersensitive research concepts has been stated to analyse gender differences in biologic as well as social determinants of health, in disease-related risk factors and in medical care. Allergic diseases show significant gender differences in prevalence, which change markedly from childhood to adult age. The causes of these gender differences and their interaction with age are mostly unknown. Artefacts in data collection and gender-related differences in exposures, diagnoses or biologic factors have been proposed as hypotheses for explanation. This paper presents examples for the existence of gender bias in epidemiologic research on allergies. It is concluded that approaches in statistical analysis are needed that take both the biologic meaning and the social impacts of the variable ‘gender’ into account. Furthermore, gender-sensitive research should be performed in the field of asthma and allergies to clarify the underlying causes for the observed gender differences.