Vandenbergh was one of 16 team members on an 18-month Institute of Medicine (IOM) study on differences between the sexes and how those differences affect health. The committees report, "Exploring the Biological Contributions to Human Health: Does Sex Matter?," concludes that many normal physiological functions and disease functions are influenced directly or indirectly by sex-based biological differences.
"The focus of study was on basic biology of sex determination -- how do we get to be males and females from a genetic, an endocrine and a developmental point of view," Vandenbergh said. "And the second part of this was, how do these basic differences between us cause us to look at diseases in a different way?"
Some basic differences in how men and women respond to disease are well-known but not well-understood. For instance, women clearly use both left and right hemispheres of the brain for language tasks, while men tend to use mainly the left hemisphere. Therefore, women are more likely to recover speech after a left-brain stroke, while it is much more difficult for men to recover from it. And women are nearly twice as vulnerable to diseases caused by tobacco smoke than men, which may account for an increase in the incidence of lung cancer among women.
On the other hand, males are much more likely to suffer from severe mental retardation, which may be the result of disruptions that occur in fetal development. During the complex process when a fetus is differentiated as male, minor lapses in hormone or genetic activity could lead to problems in a man later in life.
"Our finding is that significant difference
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Contact: Dr. John Vandenbergh
vandenbergh@ncsu.edu
919-515-5174
North Carolina State University
13-May-2001