Medical researchers are making progress into understanding why women suffer disproportionately from a number of diseases. Those insights are providing information to help develop medicines to attack diseases such as osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis, depression, rheumatoid arthritis and age-related macular degeneration, all of which affect more women than men. Currently, 851 medicines are in development for diseases that exclusively or disproportionately affect women, according to a report unveiled today by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).

The number includes 139 for cancers that affect women and 110 for autoimmune diseases, which strike women three times more often than men. The medicines are all either in human clinical trials or are awaiting review by the Food and Drug Administration.

“As recently as a couple decades ago, there was a basic assumption that what was good medically for men was good for women in almost every case. Today, the increasing  knowledge of the less obvious differences between men and women is providing great promise for new and better treatments that will benefit both sexes,” stated John J Castellani, president and CEO, PhRMA.

About 90 per cent of Americans suffering from lupus, migraines and fibromyalgia are women. There are also a growing number of similar diseases among the Indian women.

According to PhRMA study, not only are women more prone to certain diseases, but the symptoms they present may be different. Men having heart attacks, for instance, typically report chest pain that radiates down the arm, and those are the symptoms many doctors look for even today. Women may instead feel indigestion, extreme fatigue and nausea.

Among other variables, researchers developing medicines for women must take into account the possible differences in the ways men and women metabolize certain substances. For example, researchers have found that women metabolize nicotine more quickly than men, so a lower-dose nicotine patch for smoking cessation may not be as effective for women as a similar dose for men.

In the case of autoimmune diseases, which involve the body’s immune system about 23.5 million Americans, most of them women, suffer from multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. “A better understanding of how women react differently to stress than men is helping researchers understand how to approach treatments for autoimmune diseases and psychiatric illnesses such as depression and anxiety,” reports PhRMA.

Women’s bodies, for example, react to stress by producing higher levels of cytokines, which are cells secreted by the nervous system, said Dr Lorraine Fitzpatrick, Medicine Development Leader for GSK. Progress in understanding and treating autoimmune diseases represents “one of the great strides made recently for women’s health,” she added.

“We are on the edge of a whole new wave of therapies,” she said. “We should see remission in our lifetimes, and with the current speed of innovation, long-standing remission within our children’s lifetimes,” Anita Burrell, head of the Distinct Product Unit Multiple Sclerosis at sanofi-aventis.

According to Dr Fitzpatrick, considerable progress is being made in better potential treatments for osteoporosis. Biopharmaceutical research companies currently have 22 drugs  in development for preventing or treating the disease and its symptoms. The disease, which makes bones prone to fractures, affects about eight million American women and two million American men.