Divide and conquer New research suggests that the first step to preventing and treating illness is asking a simple question: What’s your sex? Here’s why— and what it means for you.
AT TAC K L O OK S L I K E : You clutch your chest, grab your left arm, then fall to the ground. That is, if you’re a man. But for a woman, most of us know the symptoms can be strikingly different: In fact, half of women report experiencing no chest pain at all. Instead they may feel pain in their backs, necks, jaws, or stomachs, or become nauseated, fatigued, or light-headed. This difference wasn’t fully documented or publicized until 1990, when the book The Female Heart: The Truth About Women & Coronary Artery Disease helped spark a new wave of thinking about not only heart disease but also medicine and the human body. “We [once] assumed all humans were pretty much the same, except for what I call the bikini view of women—their breasts and their pelvises,” says Marianne Legato, M.D., the director of the Foundation for GenderSpecific Medicine and the first author of The Female Heart. Today the thinking has changed. “Every tissue of the body is literally different in men and women,” says Legato. And heart disease, scientists have discovered, is just one of many conditions with a strong male-female divide. Here are six others that affect the sexes in distinctive ways.
Written by Laura Schocker Illustrations by Jeannie Phan
MARCH 2015
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