Figure 4. (A) Pie chart illustrating percentage of studies analyzed that reported sex as a patient characteristic. (B) Box Plots illustrating the percentage of participants of each sex in all the studies analyzed that reported sex (p-value < 0.001). (C) A scatter plot with a Pearson correlation coefficient showing that the percent of male participants has decreased with time (r = -0.31) and percent of female participants has increased with time (r = 0.31).
When looking at the change of participation rates over time, we found that the disparity between male and female participation has significantly improved. The rate of male participation has decreased by a rate of 0.65% a year since 1985 (r = -0.31, p <0.001) and the rate of female participation has increased by a rate of 0.65% a year since 1985 (r = 0.31, p < 0.001) (Figure 4C). Moreover, we found that the mean rate of participation from 2015-2019 for males was 65.21% and the mean rate of participation for females was 34.79%, which is markedly improved from the mean rate of participation from 1985-1995 when the mean participation rate was 73.60% for males and 26.40% for females (Table 2).
Table 2. Mean Rates of Participation of each Sex across all analyzed Lung Cancer Phase III Clinical Trials.