Conclusions
The purpose of this chapter has been to move beyond the traditional international health focus on women's diseases related to their reproductive and maternal functions and to highlight those conditions for which sex and gender considerations, if adequately incorporated into prevention and treatment, could reduce women's excess health burdens and, as a result, increase health equity. Because of the approach taken, the chapter has excluded a set of important conditions for which the gender ratio is similar or is unfavorable for men, including HIV/AIDS, injuries resulting from domestic violence, and malaria. Therefore, this chapter should not be viewed as covering all diseases and conditions important to women or all conditions that result from the interaction of sex and gender.
The chapter has two other main limitations. First, the dataset (the global burden of disease) understates certain disease burdens, especially for women, because it does not estimate disability weights for some gender-based conditions, such as FGM. Second, the information available for cost-effectiveness analysis is inadequate. Following this chapter's emphasis on the importance of sex and gender in explaining women's excess disease burdens, assuming that sex and gender considerations in prevention and treatment would affect the analysis of cost-effectiveness seemed reasonable; however, general information for assessing cost-effectiveness was deficient, and gender-related information was entirely lacking. This limitation was additional to the common limitation of cost-effectiveness analysis in terms of underestimating the value of prevention for conditions specific to women and non-health sector interventions important to women.
Notes
1. See, for instance, the documentation of efforts to understand gender differentials in infectious diseases (Altman 2004) and in unipolar depressive disorders (Gilbert 2004).
2. Males suffer the weight of some external causes in the burden of diseases more than females. For example, in 2001, mortality and morbidity caused by war and violence worldwide accounted for about 2.7 percent of males' total DALY losses and 0.6 percent of females' losses.
3. Cardiovascular diseases include cerebrovascular diseases but do not include ischemic heart disease, which affects men more than women, or coronary artery disease.
