Twenty-two lawmakers in the USA have written a letter calling on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publicly disclose information on the sex and ethnicity of participants in all clinical trials. The NIH runs the website ClinicalTrials.gov where all US clinical trials must be registered.
Since 1993 clinical trials funded by the NIH must include women and minorities but most trials in the US are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and the politicians are concerned that women and minorities are underrepresented in those trials. Historically, clinical trials were conducted mostly on white men, meaning medicines could be less effective or pose higher risk for women and minorities. The representatives wrote:
The website should be reflective of the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical research and be navigable and user friendly so that the public can find information not only on rates of inclusion, but also results analysed by sex in trials over all disease areas.