Irving Zucker

Who they are

Berkeley lists Zucker as a Professor of the Graduate School in psychology and integrative biology, and the 2020 paper gives both departments as his affiliation.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Sex differences in pharmacokinetics predict adverse drug reactions in women (2020), with Brian J. Prendergast. The paper notes that women experience adverse drug reactions nearly twice as often as men, and that most drugs in use were approved on trials conducted on men. Searching the published literature, the authors found that of 86 drugs, 76 had higher blood concentrations or longer elimination times in women. For 59 drugs with clinically identifiable adverse reactions, the sex difference in drug levels predicted the direction of the sex difference in reactions in 88 per cent of cases, and 96 per cent of drugs with higher levels in women were associated with more reactions in women. Only 29 per cent of drugs with higher levels in men predicted more reactions in men, and the pattern was not explained by body weight. The authors argue that equal doses risk overmedicating women and recommend evidence-based dose reductions, a proposal for regulators and further trials rather than individual advice.

Sex bias in neuroscience and biomedical research (2011), with Annaliese K. Beery as first author. A review of research on mammals in ten biological fields for 2009, finding male bias in eight and single-sex male studies outnumbering female ones by 5.5 to 1 in neuroscience.

Key ideas

Both papers argue that leaving females out of research, or failing to analyse results by sex, leaves gaps in knowledge with practical consequences, from animal models of disease to the dose of a prescribed drug.

---