Sex-Related Illness (Sex-Specific Illness)
The debate over hi-tech gender selection is still unstoppable. But 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 (based on Wikipedia) :
- Sex-linked genetic diseases : It means that the disease is inherited from one of the sex chromosomes. Humans have 23 pair of chromosomes in each cell. The first 22 pairs of chromosomes are called autosomal chromosomes and they do not determine the sex of baby. The 23rd chromosome pair are the sex chromosomes. There are two type of chromosomes which are X and Y. Females are XX while males are XY. The inheritance patterns of sex-linked diseases in family pedigrees are complicated by the fact that males always pass their X chromosome to their daughters but never to their sons, whereas females pass their X chromosomes to daughters and sons with equal.
- 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
Here are some common 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.
Diseases occur in both female and male, but are more common in either sex :
| 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 |
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