FDA Backs Women in Drug Studies
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
The Food and Drug Administration moved to force drug companies to stop excluding young women from studies of promising new medicines for fear they’ll get pregnant during the research. For years, doctors and the government considered it wise to exclude women of childbearing age from research because some drugs can harm a developing fetus. Women’s advocates said the policy kept women with life-threatening diseases away from studies of promising therapies. Such studies are often how dying patients get the quickest access to new drugs.
