Abstracts

Rationale: The necessity of focused research on women’s health issues has become more apparent with time. The FDA Office of Women’s Health was established in 1994 to advocate for the participation of women in clinical trials. The National Institutes of Health released a strategic plan in 2010 for women’s health and sex differences research. The present study evaluates the trend of clinical research focusing on women with epilepsy (WWE) by collecting data from two searchable databases: the AES Annual Meeting Abstracts database and ClinicalTrials.gov.Methods: The AES Annual Meeting Abstracts database covering years 2000 to 2014 was searched using Boolean search string “female or women.” Case reports, research inclusive of both men and women, and animal studies were excluded. The remaining study abstracts consisting of clinical research focusing on WWE were counted by year. Data were unavailable for the exact number of abstracts published per year so a broad denominator was established by doing a search for abstracts containing the word “epilepsy” for each year. The ClinicalTrials.gov database was also searched from 2000 to 2014 under the topic “Epilepsy.” Studies with only female participants were counted.Results: The above searches over the 2000 to 2014 period yielded a total of 6842 AES Annual Meeting abstracts, 134 of which described clinical research on WWE, and 853 clinical trials on epilepsy, 23 of which were focused on WWE. Figure 1 shows the percentage of accepted AES abstracts on WWE by year and Figure 2 shows the percentage of clinical trials on WWE by year. Linear trendlines suggest a decline over time in both cases though the fit was not robust.Conclusions: In the AES Annual Meeting Abstracts database and ClinicalTrials.gov, two research-related databases with a North American focus, there was suggestion of a decline in studies on WWE over time. ClinicalTrials.gov data were confounded by the fact that mandatory trial reporting was not required until 2007. If focused research on WWE is an increasing priority, further studies on this topic are encouraged.