Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
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Gender bias has been found in medical literature, with more men than women as first or senior authors of papers, despite about half of doctors being women. Nursing is about 90% female, so we aimed to determine if similar biases exist in nursing literature. ⋯ Eight journals qualified for entry, three from the United Kingdom, four from the United States of America, and one from Australia. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Using Chi-square and Fisher exact tests, we determined differences between the numbers of men and women across all the journals, between countries (USA, UK and Australia), changes over the 30 years, and changes within journals over time. RESULTS Despite the small proportion of men in the nursing workforce, up to 30% of first authors were men. UK journals were more likely to have male authors than USA journals, and this increased over time. USA journals had proportions of male first authors consistent with the male proportion of its nursing workforce. CONCLUSIONS In the UK (though not in the USA) gender bias in nursing publishing exists, even though the nursing workforce is strongly feminized. This warrants further research, but is likely to be due to the same reasons for the gender gap in medical publishing; that is, female nurses take time out to have families, and social and family responsibilities prevent them taking opportunities for career progression, whereas men's careers often are not affected in such ways.
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Schizophrenia is associated with a variety of physical manifestations (i.e. metabolic, neurological) and despite psychotropic medication being blamed for some of these (in particular obesity and diabetes), there is evidence that schizophrenia itself confers an increased risk of physical disease and early death. The observation that schizophrenia and progeroid syndromes share common clinical features and molecular profiles gives rise to the hypothesis that schizophrenia could be conceptualized as a whole body disorder, namely a segmental progeria. Mammalian cells employ the mechanisms of cellular senescence and apoptosis (programmed cell death) as a means to control inevitable DNA damage and cancer. Exacerbation of those processes is associated with accelerated ageing and schizophrenia and this warrants further investigation into possible underlying biological mechanisms, such as epigenetic control of the genome.