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Reasons for Sex-Specific and Gender-Specific Study of Health Topics
Physicians may soon need to consider as critical the sex of their patients when deciding which antidepressant or painkiller to prescribe, which angina treatment or heart attack intervention to order, or even how to urge someone to begin an exercise regimen. Sex and gender differences in health and medicine appear to be more pervasive than ever imagined.
According to a report entitled “Exploring the Biological Contributions to Human Health: Does Sex Matter?” published this spring by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) (http://www.nap.edu/books/0309072816/html/), biologists and medical researchers across disciplines now believe every organ in the body—not just those related to reproduction—has the capability to respond differently on the basis of sex. That proposal is based on an analysis of both old observations—for example, that many more women than men are likely to develop an autoimmune disease or that men on average have heart attacks at a younger age than women—and of new discoveries in microbiology and from the human genome project.
Some scientists now conclude that cells from male and female organisms differ in ways that result from chromosomes, not hormones. In other words, a male skin cell is not the same as a female skin cell, although whether this basic distinction matters in terms of health, disease, and medicine is unknown. Because cells beyond those involved in reproduction have sex differences, scientists can now legitimately theorize about previously unsuspected sex differences in many diseases and conditions.
“We have just come to realize the question [of whether there is a sex difference in any given disease or treatment] is worth asking,” explained Mary-Lou Pardue, PhD, a molecular geneticist and professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and chair of the committee that produced the IOM report. The reasons to study sex-related and gender-related health topics have …
