Science Forum: Sex differences and sex bias in human circadian and sleep physiology research
- Department of Sport and Health Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Germany
- Translational Sensory & Circadian Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany
- Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- Department of Psychology, Northumbria University, United Kingdom
- William Harvey Research Institute, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
- German Aerospace Center, Institute of Aerospace Medicine, Sleep and Human Factors Research, Germany
- Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom
- Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Science and Health Group, United Kingdom
- Data Sciences and Quantitative Biology, Discovery Science, R&D, AstraZeneca, United Kingdom
- Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
- Hepatobiliary Center, Hospital Paul Brousse (AP-HP), France
- UPR Chronotherapy, Cancer and Transplantation, Medical School, Paris-Saclay University, France
- Centre for Cardiometabolic and Vascular Science, Division of Medicine, University College London, United Kingdom
- Sleep and Circadian Research Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, United States
- School of Psychological Sciences and Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Australia
Figures
Figure 1
A review of the literature on the non-visual effects of light reveals a sex bias.
We analyzed a sample of the existing literature on the non-visual effects of light as a starting point for understanding the sex bias in the field. The sample included a total of 180 articles, and the breakdown of participant sex was then obtained in 166 articles. Binomial tests were conducted to evaluate the possibility that deviations from an even 50:50 sex distribution were attributable to chance alone. We implemented the Benjamini-Hochberg correction for multiple comparisons to control false-discovery rate (FDR). The proportion of female volunteers in each paper (represented by a dot) was plotted against the year of publication. Samples for which the proportion of female patients deviated significantly from 0.5 (P ≤ 0.05) were determined to be biased and colour-coded as orange. The marginal histograms show the numbers of papers irrespective of publication year (histogram on the right y axis), or irrespective of proportion (histogram on top x axis). Methods for paper selection are included in Methods.
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Figure 1—source code 1
R code to produce Figure 1.
- https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/65419/elife-65419-fig1-code1-v2.zip
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Figure 1—source data 1
Excel spreadsheet containing the data underlying Figure 1.
- https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/65419/elife-65419-fig1-data1-v2.xlsx
Figure 2
Suggested actions to close the sex data gap in sleep and circadian research for actors across the ecosystem.
These actions were derived from an interactive session with attendees (n = 38) during Workshop 3.
Tables
Table 1
Articles included in the meta-analysis.
| Database | Search strategy | Source paper | Articles considered | Articles included |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| – | – | Brown, 2020 | 19 | 18 |
| – | – | Lok et al., 2018 | 20 | 20 |
| – | – | Souman et al., 2018 | 49 | 45 |
| SCOPUS | Citation count | - | 359 | 94 |
| Cochrane | (light AND circadian OR sleep OR alertness)” | Pachito et al., 2018 | 5 | 0 |
| Forbes et al., 2014 | 13 | 0 | ||
| Montgomery and Dennis, 2002 | 0 | 0 | ||
| Tuunainen et al., 2004 | 49 | 3 | ||
| Slanger et al., 2016 | 21 | 0 | ||
| Dennis and Dowswell, 2013 | 10 | 0 | ||
| 545 | 180 |
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Science Forum: Sex differences and sex bias in human circadian and sleep physiology research
eLife 11:e65419.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65419
