Medications should have sex-specific dose recommendations to help reduce a substantially higher incidence of adverse events in women compared with men, researchers suggest.

The group analysed data from thousands of medical journals that detailed significant sex differences in pharmacokinetics and female- or male-biased adverse reactions.

 Data showed that for 76 out of 86 medications examined – including antipsychotics, analgesics, cardiovascular and anti-seizure drugs – women had higher drug concentrations in their blood and took longer to eliminate the drug than men, despite receiving the same standard dose.  

In more than 90% of these cases, women experienced worse side effects, such as nausea, headache, depression or cardiac anomalies, than men.