Anaheim, Calif.—Including sex as a biological variable (SABV) in pain research is crucial to rigor and reproducibility, according to a primer for pain investigators produced by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The primer, presented at the 2018 annual scientific meeting of the American Pain Society (APS; abstract 293), explains the scientific rationale for including SABV in basic, preclinical and clinical pain research. Specifically, an overreliance on male animals and cells, lack