64200event12974259941475891645<![CDATA[A Woman is Not a Small Man]]>
Abstract: More women die of cardiovascular disease than the next seven
causes of death combined. While the rate of cardiovascular disease has
been steadily declining in men, it has remained relatively constant in
women. However, most drugs and devices used to treat heart disease have
been studied in men and then applied to women, assuming that doses and
devices should be scaled down, purely by size. Medical treatment should
take biologic sex/gender into consideration. For example, women having
a heart attack may have different symptoms than men.Those symptoms in
women might include fatigue, body aches and jaw pain. In support of
these sex differences, low doses of aspirin are beneficial for both
sexes but in women, low-dose aspirin helps prevent stroke but not heart
attacks. In men, low-dose aspirin helps prevent heart attacks but not
stroke. These facts emphasize the inadequacy of studying drugs and
devices only in men. Researchers are now beginning to conduct studies
that include female animals and women.This is a welcome change given
that sex differences extend to many arenas, including responses to
exercise and to the effect of cancer on the heart. For instance, male
mice voluntarily run 25 to 31 miles per week. But female mice run twice
the distance of males each week, and they have stronger cardiac
responses to a given amount of exercise than males. Similarly, hearts
of male animals response much more pathologically than hearts of
females to cancer. These differences have been studied in mice and
observed in humans. Males with cancer lose more body weight and cardiac
mass than do females; and both of these are detrimental. This
difference is due to higher levels of estrogen in females. When
estrogen receptors are blocked in female mice, they experience weight
loss and heart-mass loss similar to males. At the same time, if male
mice are given estrogen, they get worse, indicating that estrogen might
be protective in females, but harmful in males. This could be relevant
to humans who ingest large quantities of soy (Americans spent $8
billion on soy products in 2008), which contain large quantities of
plant estrogens. Normal laboratory mouse food is soy-based, and male
mice fed this diet have much worse heart disease than do female mice.
Taken together these facts suggest that soy consumption in laboratory
animals may influence functional outcomes and that sex-based medicine
should be an important consideration.]]>
IBB Seminar Series
Leslie Anne Leinwand, PhD - University of Colorado at Boulder
A Woman is Not a Small Man
]]>Faculty host: Bob Guldberg (404) 894-6589]]><![CDATA[]]>http://cimb.colorado.edu/directory/leinwand12921795248516811880