Sex- and Gender-Informed Medicine: Why It Matters

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hello. This is Dr JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital.

I'd like to talk with you about and bring to your attention to two recent papers that address the critically important role of sex and gender in health and disease, including the impact on disease incidence, clinical manifestations, and response to treatment. One of the papers was published very recently in The Lancet, and the other paper was published earlier this year in JAMA Internal Medicine from our research group in the Connors Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Both papers review the growing evidence that biological sex and sociocultural factors encompassed by gender, including lifestyle factors, social determinants of health, and interactions with healthcare systems, are critically important in influencing health and are also important to precision medicine. After all, precision medicine begins with understanding the role of sex and gender in health.

These two papers discuss several domains, including genetic and chromosomal differences, epigenetic programming, gene expression, sex steroid hormones (including exposure to hormones in utero and throughout the life course), and immune function differences.

It's well known that there are several differences between men and women in terms of prevalence risk for various diseases.