Northwestern’s Women’s Health Research Institute has launched a registry dedicated to supporting research of men’s health in an effort to better understand women’s health.

The Illinois Men’s Health Registry looks to help researchers study factors that affect men’s health by providing a registry of men willing to participate in research.

Teresa Woodruff, director of the research institute, said studying both genders is crucial to treating them.

“To better understand women’s health, we need to understand sex differences,” Woodruff said in a news release. “That means looking at both men and women, designing studies to look at sex differences and reporting those differences by sex.”

The University also maintains a registry of women who volunteer to participate in research.

NU’s two registries are unique because, unlike other registries, they do not focus on specific ailments or diseases. Participants in NU’s registries are often used as healthy controls in studies.

Registry data is kept confidential, and participants’ personal information isn’t shared with physicians or insurers.

Woodruff said studying both genders builds a foundation for researchers designing treatments.

“Before personal and precision medicine becomes a reality, we must have a clear understanding of the basic physiological differences between the sexes,” she said in the release.

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