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Showing posts from February 23, 2014

Every Cell Has A Sex By Dr. Paula A. Johnson, MD, MPH

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It doesn’t take a medical degree to know that men and women are different; but it will take sex-specific research to better understand how cellular and molecular differences in males and females affect every aspect of our health. The phrase “every cell has a sex”, coined by the Institute of Medicine, captures the essence of how fundamentally different men and women are when it comes to our health. Our cells, the very building blocks of our existence, are infused with differences that cannot be ignored when we study the prevention, detection and treatment of disease. From cardiovascular disease to lung cancer to Alzheimer’s disease to depression, men and women’s experience of disease is distinct.  Yet every day in this country, we ignore these important health differences by funding and conducting medical research that is flawed because it fails to recognize sex differences. This failure is both an equal rights issue as well as an issue of the quality and integrity of science a