An evidence and gap map on treatment of illnesses in women
Mapping review
|Published
We have created an evidence and gap map of systematic reviews about treatment of illnesses that only affect women, and illnesses assumed to affect people differently depending on sex.
Key message
We have created an evidence and gap map of systematic reviews about treatment of illnesses that only affect women, and illnesses assumed to affect people differently depending on sex.
We identified systematic reviews through systematic literature searches, assessed references against our eligibility criteria and coded included reviews according to a pre-specified coding system. We found:
- 1739 systematic reviews pertaining to treatment of illnesses that only affect women
- 777 systematic reviews pertaining to treatment of illnesses that may affect people differently depending on sex and that provided separate analysis on sex
- 587 systematic reviews pertaining to treatment of breast cancer
More than half of the systematic reviews about treatment of illnesses affecting women in particular were conducted on women of fertile age.
There were few systematic reviews concerning treatment of children (0 to 12 years, 1%), adolescents (13 to 17 years, 2%), pensioners (67 to 79 years, 1%) or elderly patients (80 years +, 1%).
We did not identify any systematic reviews for two of the 26 prespecified illnesses affecting women only. We did not find any systematic reviews pertaining to 15 of the 77 prespecified illnesses that may affect people differently depending on sex.
This evidence and gap map does not assess single studies, the actual effect of the treatments nor the quality of the research.
