Gender medicine is the rapidly growing field of medicine that aims to provide equitable, safe, and cost- effective care for both male and female patients. While """"""""sex"""""""" is the preferred term in basic science research, in this application we have used the term """"""""gender"""""""" - referring to the socially constructed biological roles of an individual based on his or her XX or XY status - as it is more commonly used by clinicians. The focus of this field of medicine is gender-based biological differences in addition to the social mechanisms that influence the manifestation, diagnosis, and management of disease conditions. Significant gaps in gender-specific treatment and outcomes are evident in several spheres of emergency care especially neurological emergencies and resuscitation. These include cardiac arrest, traumatic brain injury and neurological recovery, acute stroke, seizures, headaches as well as in resource utilization such as diagnostic imaging or device selection. Emergency departments (ED) form the core recruitment site and laboratory for clinical research trials studying such time-sensitive conditions. With a 24-hour presence in the ED and with access to patients in these spheres, emergency physicians play an ideal role in leading gender-specific clinical studies for acute neurological care and also serve as vital partners for interdisciplinary collaboration. The 2014 Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM) consensus conference, """"""""Gender Specific Research in Emergency Care - Investigate, Understand and Translate How Gender Affects Patient Outcomes"""""""" will address this void by assembling clinicians, researchers, policy-makers, and basic and clinical scientists from multiple specialties to understand and investigate gender-related disparities in clinical outcomes of neurological emergencies. The conference will focus on high volume and resource-consuming ED visits with a particular focus on neurological emergencies.
Specific aims of the workgroup are to: 1) Summarize and consolidate current data to improve our understanding of gender-specific research for neurological emergencies and identify critical gender-related gaps in knowledge in emergency care, 2) Create a research agenda that advances gender- specific research in the prevention, diagnosis, and management of neurological emergencies, and 3) Build a multinational interdisciplinary consortium to translate, disseminate and study gender medicine of acute neurological emergencies. A designated issue of AEM and invited specialty journals will disseminate the scientific summary, research agenda, and conference proceedings, as well as original research related to gender issues. The three-year planning phase of this conference will culminate in a one-day conference on May 13, 2014 in Dallas, Texas. The collaborative network established through this conference will also create an infrastructure for continued meaningful national collaborations on gender-specific research in emergency care.
Emergency Departments (ED) serve over 136 million patients annually with 1: 1.2 ratio of male to female patients in the United States. Gender medicine investigates the biological and social mechanisms that influence disparities in diagnosis and clinical outcomes for male and female patients. This multidisciplinary conference will highlight this void in the emergency care and will develop a research agenda aimed to provide equitable, high quality, safe and cost-effective emergency care for male and female patients.
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