Sex-Related Illnesses

When it comes to health risks, sex does matter. Women are twice as likely as men to get multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and migraines. They're also more likely to get cataracts, hepatitis, and thyroid disease. Women experience depression about twice as often as men. And irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is thought to affect twice as many women as men. Although men have more heart attacks than women, more women die within a year after having a heart attack.

A sex-related illness is an illness that occurs more common to one sex. Sex-related illnesses have various causes:
- sex-linked genetic illnesses
- parts of the reproductive system that are specific to one sex
- social causes that relate to the gender role expected of that sex in a particular society.
- different levels of reporting or diagnosis in each gender.

Examples of sex-related illnesses in humans:

Men:
>	prostate cancer and other diseases of the male reproductive system occur only in men.
>	certain genetic diseases, such as colour blindness, occur more frequently in men. They are caused by sex-linked, recessive genes carried on the non-homologous portion of the X chromosome.
>	Autism is 4 times more prevalent in males than females.

Women:
>	99% of breast cancer occurs in women
>	ovarian cancer, and other diseases of the female reproductive system occur only in women. endometriosis, another female reproductive disorder occurs almost exclusively in women, but has rarely been found in men undergoing estrogen treatment for prostate cancer.
>	More women than men suffer from Sjögren's syndrome, scleroderma, and osteoporosis .
>	in Western cultures, more women than men suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia .

>	Women are more likely to suffer from unipolar clinical depression (although bipolar disorder appears to affect both sexes equally) .
>	Psychologists are more likely to diagnose women than men with borderline or histrionic personality disorder. There is no current agreement on whether this is because of a real underlying difference between the sexes, or simply because of deeply ingrained social attitudes.
>	Certain autoimmune diseases may occur predominately in one sex, for unknown reasons. For example 90% of primary biliary cirrhosis cases are women, whereas primary sclerosing cholangitis is more common in men.

Some common diseases are also related to sex, here is the list,

Stroke	Women have fewer strokes, but are more likely to die from them than men; women are generally older than men when they have a stroke
Heart attack	Men have more, but women are more likely to die within a year after a heart attack; women tend to get heart disease seven to 10 years later than men
Migraine	Three times more common in women
Depression	Twice as common in women
Hearing loss	More common in men
Nearsightedness (myopia)	More common in women through age 60
Irritable bowel syndrome	More common in women
Cancer	Cancer of the lungs, kidneys, bladder, and pancreas are more common in men; thyroid cancer is more common in women
Osteoporosis	More common in women
Rheumatoid arthritis	Two to three times more common in women
Gout	More common in men
Lupus	Nine times more common in women
Fibromyalgia	Nine times more common in women