Why do women have different susceptibility to allergies and autoimmune diseases compared to men?

These differences are typically attributed to the stronger female immune response. The weaker male response to pathogens may allow the invader to cause more damage, whereas the strong and persistent female response reduces pathogen-induced damage but may eventually trigger autoimmune processes and cause chronic damage.
Sexual dimorphism in the immune system and its mechanisms have been extensively reviewed in the context of autoimmunity, immune responses, cancer, the response to vaccination, and transplant rejection. The proportions and phenotypes of some of the immune cells are different between the sexes at baseline and may contribute to the higher inflammatory response and better survival of females with infectious diseases. Female peritoneal and plural cavities have higher numbers of T cells, B cells, and macrophages. Female peritoneal macrophages show higher expression levels of genes of the complement system, of the interferon (IFN) signaling pathways, and toll-like receptors (TLRs).
Whereas high estrogen levels increase the risk and worsen the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), rheumatoid arthritis, and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), estrogen has a protective effect in multiple sclerosis. Contraceptive pills, which contain female sex hormones and are in direct contact with the digestive system, increase the risk for IBD in genetically susceptible women. With the hormonal drop at menopause, there is a peak in RA, which can be controlled by hormonal replacement.

Study Explores Cause for Higher Autoimmune Disease Prevalence Among Women
A molecular switch in the skin cells may cause increased susceptibility to autoimmunity in women.
Women are 4 times more likely to develop autoimmune disease than men. In systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), the prevalence of the disease is 9 times higher among women; however, the cause of this disparity is largely unknown, a recent study indicates.
The study, published in JCI Insight, examined the potential mechanisms promoting increased likelihood of autoimmunity in women as opposed to men. The study pointed to a skin-targeted overexpression of the female-biased transcription cofactor vestigial like family member 3 (VGLL3) as a potential contributor to autoimmunity. Previous research has indicated that women have more VGLL3 in their skin cells than men.
According to the study, the researchers found that in mice, having too much VGLL3 in skin cells promoted an autoimmune response that extended beyond the skin. In the mouse model, overexpression of VGLL3 drove an autoimmunity-prone transcriptional signature similar to that observed in female skin, causing inflammation and activation of type I IFN signaling that mimics cutaneous lupus, according to the researchers.
Additionally, the researchers noted that extra VGLL3 in the skin cells appeared to change expression levels of a number of genes important to the immune system, including many of the same genes altered in autoimmune diseases. In mice with excess VGLL3, their skin became scaly and raw and they produced antibodies against their own tissues.
“VGLL3 appears to regulate immune response genes that have been implicated as important to autoimmune diseases that are more common in women, but that don’t appear to be regulated by sex hormones,” lead study author Johann Gudjonsson, MD, PhD, professor of dermatology at the University of Michigan Medical School, said in a press release. “Now, we have shown that overexpression of VGLL3 in the skin of transgenic mice is by itself sufficient to drive a phenotype that has striking similarities to systemic lupus erythematosus, including skin rash, and kidney injury.”
The researchers concluded that the data support the assertion that overexpression of VGLL3 in female skin primes women for autoimmunity. However, they do not know what triggers may set off overexpression of VGLL3 activity.

An allergy occurs when a person’s immune system reacts sensitively to a foreign substance which may be pollen or bee venom or any other thing. Our immune system produces antibodies to fight against unwanted substances that are harmful for us. During an allergy, the body produces antibodies to fight off against substances that do not cause harm. This immune system reaction can trigger conditions such as inflammation of skin, nasal passages or the digestive system. This can be termed as an allergic reaction.
If the allergic reaction becomes severe enough to induce life threatening symptoms then it is referred to as an Anaphylaxis. During this condition a person experiences severe allergic reactions and if not treated in time, it may even result in death.
A study has shown that women commonly, experience more severe allergic reactions than men owing to their estrogen hormones.
Studies pertaining to anaphylaxis are difficult to perform because of its life threatening nature. About 200 people die from anaphylaxis every year in the United States, but these numbers could be bigger, because many people die from unrecognized anaphylaxis. A person may be suffering from heart disease and may die because of a heart attack, but it’s also possible that the attack may well have been induced by a severe allergic reaction.
Researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases NIAID have found that female mice are more prone to more severe anaphylactic reactions as compared to their male counterparts. They discovered that estradiol, which is an estrogen, enhances the activity of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), which produces some of the common symptoms that are attributed to anaphylaxis.
Only when plain eNOS is introduced into the system of the person undergoing anaphylaxis will result in the drop of blood pressure of the person, enabling the fluid in the blood vessels to leak into the surrounding tissue, which would in turn cause swelling. Adding estradiol would further cause the symptoms to become more pronounced than ever.
Researchers in a bid to understand that whether estradiol was the real culprit blocked the estrogen in female mice. And the results showed that female mice experienced similar levels of allergic reactions as their male counterparts, thereby further strengthening the research.
So overall, the research concluded that gender factor does play an important role in allergies.
“More women are admitted to hospitals for anaphylaxis as compared to men which indicates that something is going on here. Too often these gender differences are not focused on.

Chen W, Mempel M, Schober W, Behrendt H, Ring J. Gender difference, sex hormones, and immediate type hypersensitivity reactions. Allergy Eur J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2008;63:1418–27.
Bonds RS, Midoro-Horiuti T. Estrogen effects in allergy and asthma. Curr Opin Allergy Clin Immunol. 2013;13:92–9.
Chen W, Mempel M, Schober W, Behrendt H, Ring J. Gender difference, sex hormones, and immediate type hypersensitivity reactions. Allergy. 2008;63:1418–27.
Roved J, Westerdahl H, Hasselquist D. Sex differences in immune responses: Hormonal effects, antagonistic selection, and evolutionary consequences. Horm Behav. 2017;88:95–105.
Fuseini H, Newcomb DC. Mechanisms driving gender differences in asthma. Curr Allergy Asthma Rep. 2017;17:19.
Keller T, Hohmann C, Standl M, Wijga AH, Gehring U, Melen E, Almqvist C, Lau S, Eller E, Wahn U, et al.: The sex-shift in single disease and multimorbid asthma and rhinitis during puberty—a study by MeDALL. Allergy. 2017. https://doi.org/10.1111/all.13312.
Kynyk JA, Mastronarde JG, McCallister JW. Asthma, the sex difference. Curr Opin Pulm Med. 2011;17:6–11.
McCallister JW, Mastronarde JG. Sex differences in asthma. J Asthma. 2008;45:853–61.
Vaidya V, Partha G, Karmakar M. Gender differences in utilization of preventive care services in the United States. J Womens Health (Larchmt). 2012;21:140–5.
Worldwide variation in prevalence of symptoms of asthma, allergic rhinoconjunctivitis, and atopic eczema: ISAAC. The International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) Steering Committee. Lancet 1998; 351:1225–32.

From Nature magazine
Sabra Klein came to the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Reproduction this week armed with a message that might seem obvious to scientists who obsess over sex: men and women are different. But it is a fact often overlooked by health researchers, says Klein, an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.
Her research on influenza viruses in mice, presented at the meeting in Montreal, Canada, helps explain why women are more susceptible to death and disease from infectious pathogens — and the reason is intimately linked with reproduction. “She’s one of the people that really gets the bigger picture as far as why do we see these patterns,” says Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in St. Paul.
Women generally suffer more severe flu symptoms than men, for example, despite the fact that they tend to have fewer viruses during an infection. To Klein, this suggests that women quickly mount a substantial immune-system attack to clear infections — and suffer the consequences of the inflammatory responses that flood their systems. “This is where females run into trouble,” Klein says.
She and her collaborators have found this disparity in mice infected with flu viruses. But when the researchers castrated the males and removed the ovaries from the females, the difference disappeared as the males became more sensitive to infection.
But testes are not simply protective. Klein found that giving the neutered females the female sex hormones oestrogen and progesterone actually protected them from disease.
For females, infections appear to throw these cycling sex hormones out of whack. They elongate the oestrus cycle in non-neutered female mice — stretching the part of the cycle associated with the lowest amounts of oestrogen from 4-5 days to 8-9 days.
Researchers have long known that immunological cells have receptors for sex hormones, and that autoimmune disease strikes women more frequently than men. Nevertheless, Klein says that her work should have implications for current public-health practices.
Women, who are often less likely than men to get vaccinated against flu, should be encouraged to do so, she says. And researchers may want to examine whether hormone-replacement therapies and contraceptive drugs have unintended — possibly positive — effects on some types of infectious disease.
But most importantly, Klein says, medical studies should take sex differences into account.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)Â has noted that asthma prevalence is higher among females (8.9 percent compared to 6.5 percent in males) and that women are more likely to die from asthma. The National Institutes of Health statistics show that autoimmune diseases strike women three times more than men.
A report by the Task Force on Gender, Multiple Sclerosis, and Autoimmunity shows that among people with multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, the female to male ratio is between 2:1 and 3:1. With the disease lupus, nine times as many women are affected as men.
Clough is a philosopher of science and epistemology, with a particular focus on feminist theory and gender differences. The focus of her work is to study scientific research and look for the implicit or hidden assumptions that guide that research.
She believes the link between hygiene, gender and disease is not just a fluke. "We are just now beginning to learn about the complex relationship between bacteria and health," she says. "More than 90 percent of the cells in our body are microbial rather than human. It would seem that we have co-evolved with bacteria. We need to explore this relationship more, and not just in terms of eating pro-biotic yogurt."
Thats why Clough does not recommend that parents feed their daughters spoonfuls of dirt. Just one gram of ordinary uncontaminated soil contains 10 billion microbial cells, so the effects of ingesting dirt are unknown. "We obviously do not yet know enough to differentiate between helpful and harmful bacteria," she says.
However, Clough said she can easily join in the chorus of voices of health experts who say that more outdoor time for kids is good even if that means the kids get a little dirty. "Getting everyone, both boys and girls, from an early age to be outdoors as much as possible is something I can get behind," she says.

OR WAIT null SECS
Little girls growing up in western society are expected to be neat and tidy, and one researcher who studies science and gender differences thinks that emphasis may contribute to higher rates of certain diseases in adult women. The link between increased hygiene and sanitation and higher rates of asthma, allergies and autoimmune disorders is known as the "hygiene hypothesis" and the link is well-documented. Yet the role of gender is rarely explored as part of this phenomenon.
Oregon State University philosopher Sharyn Clough thinks researchers need to dig deeper. In her new study, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, she points out that women have higher rates of allergies and asthma, and many autoimmune disorders. However, there is no agreed-upon explanation for these patterns. Clough offers a new explanation.
Clough documents a variety of sociological and anthropological research showing that our society socializes young girls differently from young boys. In particular, she notes, girls are generally kept from getting dirty compared to boys.
"Girls tend to be dressed more in clothing that is not supposed to get dirty, girls tend to play indoors more than boys, and girls playtime is more often supervised by parents," said Clough, adding that this is likely to result in girls staying cleaner. "There is a significant difference in the types and amounts of germs that girls and boys are exposed to, and this might explain some of the health differences we find between women and men."
However, that doesnt mean that parents should let their daughters go out into the back yard and eat dirt, Clough points out. "What I am proposing is new ways of looking at old studies," she said. "The hygiene hypothesis is well-supported, but what I am hoping is that the epidemiologists and clinicians go back and examine their data through the lens of gender."
The "hygiene hypothesis" links the recent rise in incidence of asthma, allergies, and autoimmune disorders such as Crohns disease and rheumatoid arthritis, with particular geographical and environmental locations, in particular urban, industrialized nations. Many scholarly studies have noted that as countries become more industrial and urban, rates of these diseases rise. For instance, the rate of Crohns disease is on the rise in India as sanitation improves and industrialization increases.

(6)
Estrogen dominance has long been discussed in relationship to chronic illness and autoimmune conditions. Do you experience any of these symptoms of estrogen dominance?
- Weight gain
- Hair loss
- Cold hands/feet
- Thyroid dysfunction
- Fibrocystic and/or tender breasts
- Impaired metabolism
- Cognitive impairment
Considering these familiar symptoms, it’s no wonder that estrogen dominance is linked to systemic dysfunction including autoimmune conditions, heightened allergic responses, and rapid aging. (7)
There are other hormonal factors to consider regarding the “over reactive” stress response in women. This stress response triggers the gene expression responsible for disrupting the endocrine system. That’s where significant problems begin.
The heightened stress response in women is generally considered to be a survival instinct. Women – as the reproductive gender – may need a higher rate of stress hormones to assure procreation.
However, that heightened ability (at chronic levels) tips the scales into disruption, dysfunction, and the tendency toward disease. The resulting endocrine disruption increases the risk factors for thyroid dysfunction, glycemic dysregulation, diabetes, and more. (8)
3) Immunity factors
Now we get to the topic of the immune system and autoimmunity. Stress hormones affect the immune system by depressing or delaying response. Many people who deal with chronic health challenges report an impaired immune system and increased frequency of colds, flu, etc.
This is different from the over active immune response that leads to autoimmunity. Yet, they’re both part of the same equation. The immune system – and the risk for autoimmune predisposition – are definitely impacted by gender-related hormones.
According to this National Institute of Health report, “It is well established that gender plays a profound role in the incidence of autoimmunity with diseases such as lupus occurring much more frequently in females than in males. This is related to higher numbers of circulating antibodies as well as other factors.” (9)
The good news is that once we’re aware of why risk factors may be increased for females, we’re now empowered with the information we need to take action and reduce our exposure to these risks.

A recent perspective published in Science Signaling outlines the gender-specific differences in the stress response and the actions of glucocorticoids, and the female superiority in terms of dealing with stress and infections.
The sex-based immunological differences contribute to variations in the incidence of autoimmune diseases and malignancies, susceptibility to infectious diseases. For example, women have a lower risk of infections but are more susceptible to autoimmune/inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus and autoimmune thyroid diseases.
In the Science Signaling perspective George Chrousos discusses these gender differences from an evolutionary perspective, including gene network evolution and steroid molecular actions, as well as sexual dimorphism even in the absence of estrogens and androgens.
The author provides a concise and contemporary view on the multilevel interactions between the stress, reproductive and immune systemsand how they may determine gender-specific stress and immune responses.
In terms of clinical implications, Chrousos goes further, discussing how stress response and immune and inflammatory reactions are more potent in women than in men.
This may explain the former’s higher prevalence of stress-related behavioral syndromes, such as anxiety, depression, psychosomatic and eating disorders, and autoimmune inflammatory or allergic disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus and multiple sclerosis, or asthma, respectively.
A 2017 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience Research examined gender differences in neural correlates of online stress-induced anxiety response in men and women with commensurable levels of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) anxiety and perceived stress. The study reports gender-specific neural correlates of anxiety during stress provocation, mainly in the medial prefrontal and parietal cortices, with opposite patterns of associations in men and women.
Specifically, gender interaction from whole-brain regression analyses was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, left inferior parietal lobe, left temporal gyrus, occipital gyrus, and cerebellum, with positive associations between activity in these regions and stress-induced anxiety in women, but negative associations in men, indicating that men and women differentially utilize neural resources when experiencing stress-induced anxiety. The observed neural difference indicates that men and women differentially utilize neural resources when experiencing anxiety during stress.
A2022 review indicates that here are multiple phenotypic differences between the immune systems of men and women. In general, men are more vulnerable to infectious diseases, and women are more prone to autoimmune diseases.

This will all cause the reaction in the patient you see of swelling of the tongue, lips, and throat causing shortness of breath and wheezing, ultimately potentially obstructing his airway. (Rebar et al., 2019)
Genetics is the study of heredity, aka how parents pass on traits to their children. This includes the variation of a gene and the trait it controls called an allele (Rebar et al., 2019). The same way a person’s genetics can determine a blue versus green eye color, the body determines the immune response based on specific alleles, specifically the Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) allele (Drug allergies 2021). Meaning depending on the genetic makeup you got from your parents, your body may react a certain way when exposed to certain medications such as penicillin. The primary role of the HLA molecules is to regulate the immune response (Drug allergies 2021). HLA molecules are expressed on the surface of most cells with a nucleus and monocytes, macrophages, dendritic cells, and T lymphocytes. This means that these are the cells involved in the immune response responsible for hypersensitivity response, including anaphylaxis.
Gender in specific can make someone susceptible or not susceptible to particular processes or diseases. For example, a woman can be more susceptible to autoimmune diseases or when the immune system cannot decipher the difference between their healthy cells and potentially harmful antigens and therefore treats them the same (Angum et al., 2020). Some believe that the incidence is higher is hidden in the XX chromosome combinations because the X chromosome is more prominent in size and therefore may have 800-900 more genes (Angum et al., 2020). Being that the rules of genetics still apply, I do not think this would change my response.
Angum, F., Khan, T., Kaler, J., Siddiqui, L., & Hussain, A. (2020, May 13). The prevalence of autoimmune disorders in women: A narrative review. Cureus. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7292717/.
Drug allergies. WAO. (n.d.). https://www.worldallergy.org/education-and-programs/education/allergic-disease-resource-center/professionals/drug-allergies.
Patterson, R. A. (2021, July 21).

The study looked for data that could distinguish a number of explanations for sex differences in these diseases: whether disease risk was correlated with distinct genetic variants in women and men, or whether the two sexes might instead have different sensitivities to the same genetic risk factors; whether sex differences in disease risk could be explained by different levels of the sex hormones testosterone or estrogen or as side effects of the development of other secondary sex characteristics (as is the case with breast and prostate cancers); or whether sex differences were linked to differences in the sex chromosomes—the fact that women have two X chromosomes while men have one X and one Y.
The authors found that sex had a significant influence on some of these diseases, including those thought to have similar prevalence in males and females. Many diseases appeared to be impacted by genes regulated by androgens or estrogens - the "male" and "female" sex hormones, respectively—and as with the new autism findings, the same common genetic differences that differently influence physical traits in men and women also appeared to contribute to risk for five of these nine diseases.
"We don't know yet why this occurs, but it does imply that the same biological pathways that influence physical sex differences also impact a number of common diseases and disorders," Weiss said. "Many people are excited about the idea of precision medicine, or how medical care can be optimized for an individual. Well, sex is something that we already know about every individual. A better understanding of how sex impacts genetic risk for disease could be a great start to improving our understanding, diagnosis, and treatment or prevention of common diseases."
Particularly striking initial findings of the Genetics paper—which the researchers caution require further study and replication by other labs—included the identification of an interaction with sex for the genetic risk factors associated with multiple sclerosis, as well as a significantly higher heritability of hypertension in women compared to men. Since hypertension occurs with similar frequency in men and women, the authors speculate this finding might imply that environmental factors play a correspondingly bigger role in male hypertension.
More information: Ileena Mitra et al. Pleiotropic Mechanisms Indicated for Sex Differences in Autism, PLOS Genetics (2016). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1006425
Michela Traglia et al. Genetic Mechanisms Leading to Sex Differences Across Common Diseases and Anthropometric Traits, Genetics (2016).

Do little girls stay too clean?
One of the most popular of the Just William stories tells how William and his Outlaw friends were joined one day by the cherished and sheltered Violet Elizabeth Bott. Violet Elizabeth had a burning desire to take part in ''boy's games''. As a result she had a wonderful time in the woods but ended up completely unrecognisable by her family.
Western society does not expect little girls to play in the dirt and get messy. Ribbons and curls tend to be more in line of what is expected of them, but writing in the US journal Social Science & Medicine, Dr Sharyn Clough, from the Department of Philosophy at Oregon State University puts forward the view that this emphasis on cleanliness may contribute to higher rates of certain diseases in adult women.
There is a well-documented link between increased hygiene and sanitation and higher rates of asthma, allergies and autoimmune disorders that is known as ''hygiene hypothesis''. Dr Clough points out that women have higher rates in all of these disorders and she thinks she knows the reason why.
''Girls,'' she says, ''tend to be dressed more in clothing that is not supposed to get dirty, they tend to play indoors more than boys and their playtime is more often supervised by parents. As a result girls stay cleaner.'' She points out that there is a significant difference in the types and amounts of germs that boys and girls are exposed to, leading her to the view that this might explain some of the health differences between men and women.
Dr Clough proposes that there should be new ways of looking at old studies. The ''hygiene hypothesis'' has linked the recent rise in asthma, allergies and autoimmune disorders such as Crohn's disease and rheumatoid arthritis with particular geographical and environmental locations. Many studies have noted that as countries become industrialised and more urban, rates of these diseases rise. A good example is India, where rates of Crohn's disease are climbing as sanitation improves and industrialisation increases.
In the United States it is reported that asthma prevalence is 8.9% in females as opposed to 6.5% in males and autoimmune diseases strike three times as many women as men. The rate for multiple sclerosis for women is double that for men and three women suffer from rheumatoid arthritis to every man. With the disease lupus, nine times as many women are affected as men. And so it goes on.

Lactobacillus bacteria -- one of the many kinds of microbes that dwell inside… (ASM MicrobeLibrary /Handout )
Why are women more prone to autoimmune diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis? A new study in mice points to a possible contributor: different types of bacteria that populate our guts.
It goes like this: Different mixes of bacteria reside in the innards of male and female mice. Those bacteria, in turn, affect the chemistry of the animals’ bodies -- and, it appears, their risk of autoimmunity.
The study, just published in Science, was done by Janet Markle of the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute, Toronto, and colleagues. It’s a little complicated, with players that include sex hormones, fatty chemicals, immune cells and a whole host of microscopic life forms.
The subject of the study was a type of mouse known as a NOD mouse, which stands for “non-obese diabetic.” These mice spontaneously develop Type 1 diabetes when the insulin-making cells of the pancreas are destroyed by the mouse’s own immune system, and female NOD mice develop diabetes twice as often as male NOD mice do. The scientists chose these mice to study because they display just the kind of sex bias in an autoimmune disease that one sees so often in people (though it’s a little different too: In people, Type 1 diabetes doesn’t display a sex difference).
The authors did a series of experiments that involved rearing mice in sterile or non-sterile environments, swapping gut contents back and forth between mice of different genders, and more besides. And they found:
--Without any gut bacteria, there’s no male-female difference in getting Type 1 diabetes. That implies the gut bacteria have something to do with the protection that male mice have.
--Male and female mice grow up to have different populations of bacteria living within them.
--These gut bacteria cause altered blood levels of the sex hormone testosterone as well as the amounts and types of certain fatty chemicals in male and female mouse blood. In other words, they can truly affect the biochemistry of the body in ways that depend on the animal’s sex.
--The protection in males against developing diabetes seems to depend on testosterone levels going up in response to their microscopic gut tenants.
--Here’s a key experiment: When bacteria from male mice are transferred over to female mice, the females become protected against the development of diabetes.

Miguel Cuchacovich when using progesterone treatment in RA patients. Dr. Valentino also describes decreased levels of testosterone in such patients and has shown the positive effects in laboratory and clinical studies when testosterone is used as therapy.
The Endocrine System & Autoimmune Diseases
The endocrine system is a target for autoimmune diseases. As the body’s hormonal regulator, the endocrine system releases and then slows and/or stops the production of different hormones in response to various internal and external triggers.
The tightly controlled network of endocrine organs and glands (which includes the thyroid, pancreas, pituitary, adrenal, ovaries and testes) may be affected in cases of autoimmune disease. In cases of insulin-dependent diabetes, the pancreas comes under attack, while in Graves’ disease, as discussed earlier, the thyroid gland goes into overdrive in response to overproduction of antibodies.
Autoimmune disorders involving the endocrine system may also arise when a person produces antibodies to a particular hormone. Antibodies against naturally occurring hormones such as estradiol and progesterone can wreak havoc. When women make antibodies to such hormones, they may experience erratic ovulation or insufficient production of the uterine lining. These conditions can cause abnormal menstrual periods and even prevent successful implantation and pregnancy.
While autoimmune diseases certainly afflict men, it is virtually impossible to ignore the fact that they are much more prevalent in the opposite sex. In his book Women and Autoimmune Disease, Dr. Robert Lahita writes, “Why is there such a seemingly unfair preponderance of women associated with practically every one of the autoimmune diseases? As it turns out, one of the greatest factors that influence the immune system is gender.”
The Role of Estrogen in the Immune System
Many scientists are focusing their research efforts on trying to understand precisely why it is that autoimmune diseases are more common in women than in men. The authors of The Immune System Cure offer the following explanation: “Scientists believe that the female hormone estrogen may be the reason for this. The hormone estrogen may interplay with certain immune factors that enhance the action of the inflammatory response, increasing antibodies that attack certain tissues in the body. An over abundance of estrogen or estrogen-dominance may be a factor in the prevalence of autoimmune conditions in women.”
Other studies have shown that during their reproductive years, when estrogen levels are higher, females tend to have a more vigorous immune response.

Consistent evidence has shown that medical illness, and as such anything that could worsen the functioning or quality of life of patients, would increase the suicide risk of the patients.38 ,39 Allergen-induced asthma, with its connotation of suffocation and marked restriction imposed on physical activity,20 may also contribute to the observed connection.
This study indicates that men appear more sensitive to lower concentrations of pollen, while women tend to show a stronger effect, but only when the pollen counts reach to a certain level. This is consistent with earlier studies suggesting a stronger association between tree pollen peaks and suicide in women than in men,7 and a stronger spring peak of suicide in women with atopic illness as compared with that in men with this illness.6 Men could be more sensitive to small concentrations as they are more reactive in regard to the patency of the small airways, while for women, the effect might be stronger because of greater inflammation in the smaller airways.40 Another explanation could be the sex-differentials in the comorbidity of asthma with allergic rhinitis, as women who were IgE positive had more asthma control problems, lower asthma-related quality of life and were more susceptible to asthma triggering than men.41 In addition, a genome-wide analysis showed major sex differences in gene expression in allergen-challenged CD4+ cells, and an underexpression of chemotaxis-related genes in women,42 suggesting that it might take a stronger stimulus in women to induce a cellular infiltrate that could perpetuate and augment allergic inflammation. This is supported by the observation of a lower concentration of allergen-specific IgE in the nasal fluid in women than in men with seasonal allergic rhinitis.42 Alternatively, the significant sex-difference may be relevant to non-specific psychological mechanisms related to sex-differentials in their reactions to medical illness and activity limitations.38 ,39 At the level of exposure, men are known to spend more time outdoors, either professionally or recreationally, which may potentially exploit their response to lower levels of pollen.
It is intriguing that we did not noted an additional effect of a very high level of air pollen, that is, more than 100 pollen grains/m3 air, on suicide rate in the population, regardless of sex, age and history of mood disorders. This is probably because most allergy sufferers begin to experience symptoms when the pollen count reaches the moderate level,43 ,44 although the threshold, the level of pollen exposure at which allergy symptoms occur, may vary from one person to another.

It turns out that testosterone likely helps to explain why far more women develop asthma following puberty as compared to men. The incidence of asthma in women is double that of men, and more severe, according to the Australian and French authors of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.
This is in contradiction to the fact that before puberty, asthma is more common in boys than girls.
“Our research shows that high levels of testosterone in males protect them against the development of allergic asthma,” said Dr. Cyril Seillet of Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in a press release.
The team looked at innate lymphoid cells – or ILC2s – a type of immune cell that has recently been associated with the onset of asthma. It found that testosterone halted the production of those cells.
“Testosterone directly acts on ILC2s by inhibiting their proliferation,” Seillet said. “So in males, you have less ILC2s in the lungs and this directly correlates with the reduced severity of asthma.”
The discovery could lead to ways to treat or even to prevent asthma, according to the researchers.

We need to be better at associating diseases with gender,” said Dean Metcalfe, M.D., NIAID Laboratory of Allergic Diseases chief and a co-author for the study.

For years women have cried “man flu” when men make a fuss over a few sniffles.
But a new study suggests that men may actually suffer more when they are struck down with flu - because high levels of testosterone can weaken their immune response.
The study by Stanford University School of Medicine, examined the reactions of men and women to vaccination against flu.
It found women generally had a stronger antibody response to the jab than men, giving them better protection against the virus.
Men with lower testosterone levels also had a better immune response, more or less equivalent to that of women.
It has long been suggested that men might be more susceptible to bacterial, viral, fungal and parasitic infection than women are.
The study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found women had higher blood levels of signaling proteins that immune cells pass back and forth, when the body is under threat.
Previous research has found that testosterone has anti-inflammatory properties, suggesting a possible interaction between the male sex hormone and immune response.
Professor of microbiology and immunology Mark Davis said: “This is the first study to show an explicit correlation between testosterone levels, gene expression and immune responsiveness in humans.
“It could be food for thought to all the testosterone-supplement takers out there.”
Scientists said they were left perplexed as why evolution would designed a hormone that enhances classic male sexual characteristics - such as muscle strength, beard growth and risk-taking propensity - yet left them with a weaker immune system.
Previous studies have found that while women may accuse men of exaggerating when they have flu, females who are more likely to admit to having sniffles and sneezes.
The research, carried out by London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine last winter, shows that women are are 16 per cent more likely to say they are ill.

To me this makes sense evolutionarily, as females are smaller and slower in general than males and are often responsible for children who are even smaller and slower still, both fighting and fleeing are less viable means of survival.
The Autoimmune Connection
So how does this relate to autoimmunity and its feminine dominance? While appreciating the elegance of Maready’s line of reasoning and his gathering of evidence regarding neurological disorders, there really wasn’t that much information so far that was new or shocking to me. It was when Maready started wading into the waters of autoimmunity that he blew my mind. Maready (with the help of LeAnne’s own research) noted that onset of autoimmune conditions in women often occurred immediately following four main triggers: infection, pregnancy, extreme physical exertion, or heightened stress. What do these four triggers have in common? They are all immune activation events, calling white blood cells to sites of stress or injury.
“‘I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis after my first pregnancy,’ I would hear again and again,” says Maready. That sentence gave me chills because I developed rheumatoid arthritis a few months after my daughter was born, and I wondered at the time if the pregnancy was a trigger, but the best info I could find was that RA often goes into remission during pregnancy because of the supposed down-regulation of the immune system.
So we know that the white blood cells that arrive at these sites are likely to contain at least some aluminum, which we know will not be good for the already-stressed cells, but that alone doesn’t explain why the inflammation response keeps going and often increases in intensity to the point where the body is spending a great deal of energy attacking its own tissues. Maready’s explanation had me riveted.
If you know anything about Lyme disease, you may know that one of biggest reasons it is so hard to get rid of is that the bacteria that causes it are spirochetes which have three different forms. When antibiotics kill the bacteria in its active form, the remaining bacteria revert to forms that are much harder to kill until it’s “safe” to come out and proliferate again.

Autoimmune diseases are the third most common category of disease in the United States after cancer and heart disease.1 Conservative estimates indicate that three-quarters of the persons with autoimmune diseases are women.2
Autoimmune disease refers to a group of more than 80 serious, chronic illnesses including diseases of the nervous, gastrointestinal, and endocrine systems as well as skin and other connective tissues, eyes, blood, and blood vessel.
Autoimmune diseases may manifest in many different places in the body, with many different diagnoses. Their common thread is that the body makes antibodies to its own tissues. The body’s immune system becomes misdirected, attacking the very organs it was designed to protect.
Autoimmune diseases tend to cluster in families and in individuals – a person with one autoimmune disease is more likely to get another. This indicates that common mechanisms are at work. Studies of the prevalence of autoimmune disease in monozygotic (identical) twins show that genetic as well as environmental factors are necessary for the disease to develop.3 Also, infections play a big role in the development of autoimmune disease.
A study published in the April 1, 2007 edition of Nature Immunology concluded that allergic and inflammatory diseases may actually trigger autoimmune diseases by relaxing the controls that normally eliminate newly produced, self-reactive B cells. This is important because many autoimmune diseases are caused by self-reactive antibodies produced by such B cells.
The common thread is development of antibodies to ones own tissues.
Why would the body become “allergic” to itself?
Immunity begins at birth. Soon after giving birth, female mammals produce colostrum, which is a milk-like substance that jump-starts a newborn’s immune system. Human breast milk contains large quantities of secretory IgA, lysozyme-secreting macrophages, and lymphocytes (T cells and B cells). The lymphocytes release compounds that strengthen the immune response of the infant. There is evidence that the protection given by breast milk lasts for years.10
Our lymphocytes react to all our tissues. Why, then, does the process sometimes become pathologic? Why don’t we react to our own tissues all the time?
Our immune system is designed to protect us against that which is foreign, while recognizing that which is native. If, for some reason, our own tissues become contaminated with something foreign which attaches itself to the proteins of the tissues and changes the configuration of the proteins, the body could very well become confused.

The team investigated several leading hypotheses that attempt to explain this phenomenon, including the idea that clinicians are not as good at recognizing autism in females, that autism represents an "extreme male brain" that is naturally more common in males, or that autism is driven by differences in sex hormones, and found that these did not appear to be major factors in the genetics of the disease.
Instead, the team found that autism risk is associated with genetic variants that are known to contribute differently to physical traits such as height, weight, BMI, and waist and hip measurements in men and women, suggesting that their effects on autism risk might differ between the sexes, as well.
"The results indicate that there are fundamental genetic sex differences in autism," Weiss said. "It suggests that genetic variants that may be important predictors of autism risk for girls may not be so important for boys, or vice versa. This means that interpretation of genetic testing in autism could potentially be improved and refined by considering sex. Further in the future, similar implications should be considered for autism treatments - if there are sex differences in the underlying biology, response to specific treatments might also be different by sex."
Biological drivers of sex differences may influence many common diseases, including multiple sclerosis and hypertension, researchers find
Weiss's team followed up this research with a second paper—published online December 14, 2016 in Genetics and scheduled for print in February, 2017—exploring the role of sex differences on the genetics of nine other diseases, some that strike men more frequently (ankylosing spondylitis and type 1 diabetes), some that are more common in women (multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis), and others that occur with similar frequency in men and women (bipolar disorder, coronary artery disease, Crohn's disease, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes).

A pair of studies by researchers at UC San Francisco suggest that genetic variants that have distinct effects on physical traits such as height, weight, body mass, and body shape in men versus women are also linked to men's and women's risk for a range of diseases—including autism, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and others. The results suggest that at least some of the fundamental biological drivers of disease may be significantly different in men and women, an idea that could have significant impacts on disease research and treatment, the authors say.
The idea of sex differences in disease is an old one. Some disorders (such as multiple sclerosis) are more common in women, while others (such as autism) are more common in men. Other diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, can simply look very different in men and women, and the two sexes are also known to respond differently to certain drugs, making sex differences a crucial factor for doctors to take into account in diagnosis and treatment.
Despite the prevalence of sex differences in many diseases, however, scientists still do not have a comprehensive understanding of the biology that drives these differences. Many studies in humans and model organisms have sought to address this question, but their results have been contradictory, according to Lauren A. Weiss, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry at UCSF, and senior author on the two new studies.
"While some studies have looked at small regions of the genome or tried to support one specific hypothesis with respect to sex differences, few studies have looked at the question from a comprehensive genome-wide perspective," Weiss said.
In the two new studies, Weiss and her team analyzed genome-wide association study (GWAS) data to search for patterns that might support or rule out competing hypotheses about the origins of sex differences in a number of diseases, and compared these patterns with those associated with physical traits that obviously differ between the sexes, such as height, body mass index (BMI), and waist-to-hip ratios.
Research suggests fundamental biological sex difference in autism
In the first study, published online November 15, 2016 in PLoS Genetics, researchers in the Weiss lab, which is affiliated with the Institute for Human Genetics at UCSF, investigated why autism occurs nearly five times more often in boys than in girls, a mystery that has puzzled researchers for many years.

They may also get a bald spot on the crown of their head. Women have either thinning all over or random bald patches.
Hormones are often to blame for acne. Because women’s hormones shift during periods, pregnancy, and throughout menopause, they’re more prone to adult acne than men.
Treatment can vary based on your sex, too as doctors tend to prescribe medications that control hormones, like birth control, for women.
Creams that you rub onto your skin are more common for men.
Women are more likely to say they’re stressed than men but both sexes feel anger, crankiness, and muscle tension at near the same rates from stress.
Women more often say it causes a headache, upset stomach, or makes them feel like they need to cry. Men are less likely to feel physical symptoms during times of stress than women.
More women live with chronic pain (pain that lasts longer than 6 months and doesn’t seem to respond to treatment) than men.
Their pain also tends to last longer and be more intense. Doctors are still trying to figure out why, but they think differences in hormones between the sexes may be to blame.
Because women are more likely to get osteoporosis, it’s often overlooked in men. The condition is 4 times as likely in women than men.
Women over the age of 50 are the most likely people to develop osteoporosis because our lighter, thinner bones and longer life spans are part of the reason we have a higher risk.
Men can get osteoporosis, too — it’s just less common.But men who have this lack of bone density and break a hip are twice as likely to die than women with osteoporosis who break
Although women tend to get urinary tract infections more often, men’s UTIs are more complicated. They have different causes, too.
Women most often get them because of bacteria from sex or faeces (because our urethra is shorter and closer to that area.
Men’s UTIs are more likely to arise from something that blocks their urine stream, like an enlarged prostate or kidney stones.
Women are less likely to have symptoms with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) like chlamydia and gonorrhoea. STDs can also lead to chronic pelvic inflammatory disease in women, causing fertility issues.
Men seldom have such complications. The human papillomavirus (HPV) is also the main cause of cervical cancer in women, but it doesn’t pose a similar risk for men.

Gene linked to lupus might explain gender difference in disease risk
DALLAS March 30, 2009
In an international human genetic study, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have identified a gene linked to the autoimmune disease lupus, and its location on the X chromosome might help explain why females are 10 times more susceptible to the disease than males.
Identifying this gene, IRAK1, as a disease gene may also have therapeutic implications, said Dr. Chandra Mohan, professor of internal medicine and senior author of the study. "Our work also shows that blocking IRAK1 action shuts down lupus in an animal model. Though many genes may be involved in lupus, we only have very limited information on them," he said.
The study appears online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Locating IRAK1 on the X chromosome also represents a breakthrough in explaining why lupus seems to be sex-linked, Dr. Mohan said. For decades, researchers have focused on hormonal differences between males and females as a cause of the gender difference, he pointed out.
"This first demonstration of an X chromosome gene as a disease susceptibility factor in human lupus raises the possibility that the gender difference in rates may in part be attributed to sex chromosome genes," Dr. Mohan said.
Systemic lupus erythematosus, or lupus for short, causes a wide range of symptoms such as rashes, fever or fatigue that make it difficult to diagnose.
The multicenter study involved 759 people who developed lupus as children, 5,337 patients who developed it as adults, and 5,317 healthy controls. Each group comprised four ethnicities: European-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanic-Americans.
In previous genetic studies, the researchers had found an association but not a definite link between lupus and IRAK1.
For the current study, the researchers studied five variations of the IRAK1 gene in the subjects, and found that three of the five variants were common in people with either childhood-onset or adult-onset lupus.
To further test the link, the researchers then took mice of a strain that normally is prone to developing lupus and engineered them to lack the IRAK1 gene. In the absence of IRAK1, the animals lacked symptoms associated with lupus, including kidney malfunction, production of autoimmune antibodies and activation of white blood cells.

Female hormones may be linked to asthma
Fluctuations in female sex hormones could play a role in the development of allergies and asthma, a major review of evidence suggests.
Analysis of studies involving more than 500,000 women highlights a link between asthma symptoms and key life changes such as puberty and menopause.
Further investigation could help explain why asthma is more common in boys than girls in childhood, but more common in teenage girls and women following puberty.
Experts say, however, that the relationship is inconclusive and call for more research.
Asthma affects more than five million people in the UK. It is a disease of the airways that can seriously restrict breathing and is often associated with allergies.
Many women report that their asthma symptoms change with their menstrual cycle, which may be down to variations in levels of hormones, including oestrogen and progesterone, but the link is unclear.
Asthma and allergy symptoms are often affected by life events such as puberty and menopause, but the reasons behind this are unclear.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh reviewed more than 50 studies of women with asthma from puberty to 75 years of age.
They found that starting periods before turning 11 years old, as well as irregular periods, was associated with a higher rate of asthma.
Onset of menopause – when periods stop and oestrogen and progesterone levels fluctuate – was also associated with a higher chance of having asthma compared with pre-menopause.
Scientists say the link between asthma and hormonal drugs including HRT and contraceptives is unclear and women should continue to take medications as prescribed by their GP.
The researchers plan to study the biological processes through which sex hormones might play a role in asthma and allergy.
In carrying out this systematic review, we noted that there were many differences between studies investigating hormonal treatments in terms of the type and dose of hormone, and the way patients took the treatment. This made it difficult to draw firm conclusions from the results. We are now undertaking a project to clarify the role of contraceptives and HRT in asthma and allergy symptoms.
The study, published in Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, was funded by the Chief Scientist Office, part of the Scottish Government Health Directorates.

-- Robert Preidt
WEDNESDAY, Dec. 4, 2013 (HealthDay News) -- Women with pollen
allergies may be at increased risk for blood cancers such as
leukemia and lymphoma, a new study suggests.
Researchers did not uncover the same link in men. This suggests
there is something unique in women that causes chronic
allergy-related stimulation of the immune system to increase
vulnerability to the development of blood cancers, the study
The study included 66,000 people, aged 50 to 76, who were
followed for an average of eight years. During the follow-up
period, 681 people developed a blood cancer. These people were more
likely to be male, to have two or more first-degree relatives with
a history of leukemia or lymphoma, to be less active and to rate
their health status as poor.
Among women, however, a history of allergies to plants, grass
and trees was significantly associated with a higher risk of blood
cancers. The reason for this is unknown but may have something to
do with the effects of hormones, according to the authors of the
study in the December issue of the
American Journal of Hematology.
"To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study to suggest important gender differences in the association between allergies and [blood cancers]," wrote study first author Dr. Mazyar Shadman, a senior fellow in the clinical research division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
Shadman noted that there is great scientific interest in the
immune system's potential role in cancer development.
"If your immune system is over-reactive, then you have problems; if it's under-reactive, you're going to have problems. Increasing evidence indicates that dysregulation of the immune system, such as you find in allergic and autoimmune disorders, can affect survival of cells in developing tumors," Shadman said in a news release from the center.
While the study found an association between pollen allergies
and blood cancers among women, it did not prove
The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more about
EBSCO Information Services is fully accredited by URAC. URAC is an independent, nonprofit health care accrediting organization dedicated to promoting health care quality through accreditation, certification and commendation.
Please be aware that this information is provided to supplement the care provided by your physician.

- It might be Mom’s fault. Having a family history of the condition raises risk for both genders and, interestingly, the connection is even stronger for women. A woman whose mother has or had arthritis is likely to develop the problem at the same age and in the same joints.
Rheumatoid Arthritis: A More Aggressive Immune System Raises Women’s Risk
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is different from osteoarthritis in that the inflammation is an autoimmune reaction and unrelated to wear and tear on the joints. Three times as many women as men get RA. Also, women tend to be younger when they get RA and, as with osteoarthritis, their pain is worse.
Experts believe there are two main reasons for the gender differences in RA. First, women get autoimmune diseases in far greater numbers than men – it’s thought that the female immune system is stronger and more reactive. Second, it appears that hormones affect RA risk and flares. Many women with RA who get pregnant experience fewer or no symptoms at all, only to find that they reappear after the baby is born. And breastfeeding lowers the risk of developing RA; a woman who has breastfed for two years has reduced the risk she will ever get the condition by half.

New studies take a pointed look at the differences in body function relating to this tendency. These studies mainly focus on the brain.
One study in particular, demonstrated the brain function focusing on the amygdala (4) (the part of the brain responsible for the fight, flight, or freeze response). As expected, the engagement and disengagement to stress were measured and documented. However, the results of the stress response were surprising.
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The study subjects were monitored while under intentional stress and their hormone level responses were measured. They were then given a cognitive test regarding facial recognition. The men’s ability to recognize faces (and discern whether they were friendly or threatening) diminished while women’s ability to discern faces was heightened.
While the study didn’t go into details about how long these stress hormones continued to affect the genders differently, I’d surmise that the stress response in women continued longer than for men.
This hypothesis seems to be true considering that women suffer from chronic stress more often than men. In fact, the rates of women experiencing long term stress disorders such as generalized anxiety, PTSD, depression, and irritable bowel syndrome are all nearly double that of men. Furthermore, Debra Bangasser from Temple University states, ”Some differences may contribute to disease and some may not. Problems occur when the system is responding when it shouldn’t be or when it’s responding for a really long time in a way that becomes disruptive.” (5)
2) Hormone levels
Studies already demonstrate that women have increased hormonal activity under stress in contrast to men. It’s often postulated that fibromyalgia occurs more often in women than men because of “hormones.” But what does that really mean?
Hormones have a direct effect on gene expression; therefore, the types of hormones and the duration of exposure to these hormones can turn on or off various genes related to disease and systemic function. The gene expression difference in men and women may cause women to react to stress differently.
In studies using rats, the tendency to groom frequently is an indicator of high stress. When stress factors are introduced to both male and female study subjects, the behaviors that demonstrate stress increase. The significant difference, however, is that for female subjects, the grooming behavior becomes compulsive and obsessive in direct proportion to the levels of estrogen in the body. The more estrogen, the more frenetic the subject becomes.

For example, according to the US National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine, women contract an autoimmune disease more than twice as frequently as men – 6.4% of women in the US compared to 2.7% of men. In addition, some autoimmune diseases seem to be more common in certain ethnic groups: lupus, for example, affects more African-American and Hispanic people than Caucasians.
Some autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and lupus, often occur within families. Environmental and lifestyle factors are also thought to play an important role in triggering autoimmunity. These include increased exposure to chemicals and solvents, and an unhealthy diet of high fat, high sugar and highly processed foods. Another theory is that, because of an excessive focus on cleanliness and the increased use of antiseptics, children today aren’t exposed to as many germs as they were in the past, causing the immune system to overreact to harmless substances. However, none of these theories have been proven.
According to the US Department of Health & Human Services, about 24 million people in the US and about 65 million people in Europe are affected by autoimmune diseases, which are often chronic, debilitating and life threatening, mostly requiring lifelong treatment.1 It has been estimated that autoimmune diseases are among the leading causes of death amongst women in the US for all age groups up to 65 years. Worldwide, the incidence and prevalence of autoimmune diseases is steadily increasing.
80 known autoimmune diseases with no available cure
Today, more than 80 diseases caused by the immune system attacking the body’s own organs, tissues and cells have been identified. Some of the more common of these diseases include:
- Type 1 diabetes;
- Rheumatoid arthritis;
- Systemic lupus erythematosus; and
- Inflammatory bowel disease.
Current medications for these diseases, including nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and immunosuppressants, are typically directed at alleviating symptoms and managing pain, rather than curing the underlying condition. The long-term use of many of these medicines can cause significant side effects.
A new treatment strategy to reset the immune system
As autoreactive T cells seem to play a crucial role in the development of most life-threatening autoimmune diseases, a relatively new treatment strategy aims to reset the body’s immune system through self- or donor-derived blood stem cell transplants. In the absence of the original antigenic triggers, immune homeostasis is restored and self-tolerance can return.

The estimated community prevalence, which takes into account the observation that many people have more than one autoimmune disease, was 4.5% overall, with 2.7% for males and 6.4% for females.
In both autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, the condition arises through aberrant reactions of the human adaptive or innate immune systems. In autoimmunity, the patient's immune system is activated against the body's own proteins. In chronic inflammatory diseases, neutrophils and other leukocytes are constitutively recruited by cytokines and chemokines, resulting in tissue damage.
Mitigation of inflammation by activation of anti-inflammatory genes and the suppression of inflammatory genes in immune cells is a promising therapeutic approach. There is a body of evidence that once the production of autoantibodies has been initialized, autoantibodies have the capacity to maintain their own production.
Stem cell transplantation is being studied and has shown promising results in certain cases.
Altered glycan theory
According to this theory, the effector function of the immune response is mediated by the glycans (polysaccharides) displayed by the cells and humoral components of the immune system. Individuals with autoimmunity have alterations in their glycosylation profile such that a proinflammatory immune response is favored. It is further hypothesized that individual autoimmune diseases will have unique glycan signatures.
According to the hygiene hypothesis, high levels of cleanliness expose children to fewer antigens than in the past, causing their immune systems to become overactive and more likely to misidentify own tissues as foreign, resulting in autoimmune or allergic conditions such as asthma.
- "Autoimmune diseases fact sheet". Office on Women's Health. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 16 July 2012. Archived from the original on 5 October 2016. Retrieved 5 October 2016.
- Katz U, Shoenfeld Y, Zandman-Goddard G (2011). "Update on intravenous immunoglobulins (IVIg) mechanisms of action and off- label use in autoimmune diseases". Current Pharmaceutical Design. 17 (29): 3166–75. doi:10.2174/138161211798157540. PMID 21864262.
- Borgelt, Laura Marie (2010). Women's Health Across the Lifespan: A Pharmacotherapeutic Approach. ASHP. p.

To be ill can be described as a more socially acceptable behaviour for women than for men. Men should be strong, and this stoicism may lead men to ignore symptoms of serious disease and may in the end be counterproductive to good health but ironically creates statistically healthier men. Women are viewed as being more sensitive to their symptoms and thus are seen with more tolerance and given greater societal permission to be sick. The supposedly greater confidence of women in the health care system is another reason why they seek help more often.
A second explanation concerns the distinction between disease and illness. That is, the difference between a medically established disease diagnosis and a person's own subjective experience of illness. Disease can occur without illness, for example in early forms of cancer, high blood pressure, etc. and the opposite is true as well, pain and exhaustion do not always find a diagnosis. Men contract far more diagnosed diseases while women suffer from more unspecified illnesses.
Women constitute a majority concerning "undetermined illnesses," such as muscle and joint pain or psychiatric conditions where a disease diagnosis can not be established so easily. This failure of definition or establishing a diagnosis also limits the possibility for answering with a rational and effective medical treatment and leads to extended illnesses.
A third explanation operates to the contrary of the explanation just named above, namely, that labelling with an inaccurate diagnosis can worsen treatment. This especially concerns certain illnesses that are symptoms of more deep rooted injuries and where the primary cause is untreated. We know that incest and psychological violence against children often goes undetected. Women and men often handle early traumas in different ways. In adult life men may express different defence/attack reactions, by being abusive or apathetic. This "closing off' of oneself, this internalization, can lead men to earlier deaths while women more often deny outside factors and blame themselves: a woman's body becomes a seismograph for the subconscious, often reacting with diffuse pain. Women are raised to turn conflicts and rage inwards, with depression as a result, while men are raised to be aggressive.
A fourth explanation concerns what I would call frustration diseases, which have their roots in a feeling of not being adequate. It is a poor state of health which can be characterized by an inability to handle the contradictory influences of modern society. On the one hand domestic roles are still emphasized, but on the other hand women are expected to work outside their homes and contribute to the household economy.

First, we have undergone a revolutionary change in how we fuel our body. For tens of thousands of years, mankind ate unprocessed, truly natural food. In the last 150 years or so, our diets have changed dramatically. Our genes simply cannot adapt that quickly. The human body is not designed to run on 150 pounds per year of processed sugar, nor is it designed to run on baby formula, aspartame, pesticides, hydrogenated oils or meat from animals fed unnatural diets and hormones. Sugar for example, impairs the intestinal microflora and undermines a strong immune system.
Second, there is the “hygiene hypothesis,” which suggests germ-free homes and childhood vaccinations have eliminated challenges to our immune systems so they don’t learn how to defend us properly when we’re young. The immune system is sort of like a muscle – use it or lose it. We eat food inoculated with antibiotics. Our children stay indoors more, play outside less. Studies suggest that children who are raised with pets, have older siblings, play with livestock on the farm, are less likely to develop allergies, probably because they are exposed to more microbes than those living in overly sterile homes. “The data are very strong,” said Erika von Mutius of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. “If kids have all sorts of exposures on the farm by being in the stables a lot, close to the animals and the grasses, and drinking cow’s milk from their own farm, that seems to confer protection.” Researchers believe the lack of exposure to potential threats early in life leaves the immune system with fewer command-and-control cells known as regulatory T cells, making the system more likely to overreact or run wild.
Third, environmental pollution and sedentary lifestyles may play more of a role than we understand. One reason that many researchers suspect something about modern living is to blame is that the increases in allergies and auto-immune diseases show up largely in highly developed countries in Europe and North America. The illnesses have only started to rise in other countries as they have become more developed. Donna Jackson Nakawaza, author of The Autoimmune Epidemic, implicates the bioaccumulation of toxins that pervade our home, food, and environment, as a primary cause of autoimmune diseases. What effect are plastics and other persistent organic pollutants having on human health?

MARS/VENUS VACCINE RESPONSES
ANCHOR LEAD: ADD DIFFERENCES IN RESPONSES TO VACCINES TO THE LONG LIST OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALES AND FEMALES, ELIZABETH TRACEY REPORTS
More women than men complain of negative side effects of vaccination and may therefore avoid it in the future. Now a Johns Hopkins literature review led by Sabra Klein has concluded that sex is an often overlooked aspect of vaccine response that could have practical implications, such as explaining this antipathy.
KLEIN: What we find is that across very diverse vaccines, women mount significantly higher immune responses against vaccines, which is very beneficial when we think about efficacy of vaccines and protection. The downside of these heightened immune responses is that we also experience significantly more frequent and more severe adverse reactions, including fever, pain and inflammation at the site of vaccination. :26
Klein says that a better understanding of female physiology throughout the lifespan would also help predict immune responses, such as during pregnancy or after menopause. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.

They also have more of an enzyme that converts testosterone to oestrogen. `Hormones and chromosomes may be important in thinking about disease and health for women and men.
In A fascinating study last year, University of Michigan researchers looked at how men and women responded to health messages. When they were shown poster adverts for exercise, men were more motivated by those that mentioned weight loss and health, women were motivated by those focused on wellbeing.
`We know men have more visual brains and respond better to visual messages in adverts. Women response to detail, so are more likely to absorb the total picture,' says Dr von Lob.
Men and women respond to eating chocolate with different parts of their brains, a Dutch study in 2005 found. In particular, women had reduced activity in the hypothalamus, which controls feelings of hunger, so they had to eat more to get a similar effect as men.
The researchers concluded their results `indicate that men and women differ in their response to satiation [feeling full] and suggest that the regulation of food intake by the brain may vary between the sexes'.
Dr David Katz, founding director of Yale University's Prevention Research Centre, agrees. `There are clear differences between the sexes,' he says. `Studies show women crave sugar and fat more while men are more likely to crave meat.'
And you can blame our cavemen ancestors. `All such differences tend to make sense in an evolutionary context,' says Dr Katz. `Men need a bit more protein to build the muscle that makes them most capable of surviving, succeeding and passing on their genes.
`Women do the harder work of procreation. They need more fat stores to get a baby through gestation and to produce sex hormones such as oestrogen. Those hormones, in turn, seem to affect dietary preferences.' That is why women's desire for chocolate can be affected by the menstrual cycle.
In one analysis of brains, Larry Cahill, professor of neurobiology and behaviour at the University of California, found the male amygdala appears to be more active on the right side, but a woman's is more active on the left.
The left side is connected with the area that governs emotions and self-awareness. `So men under stress want to go for a run, let off steam or have space to themselves,' says Dr von Lob.

Women’s immune system genes operate differently from men’s
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A new technology for studying the human body’s vast system for toggling genes on and off reveals that genes associated with the immune system toggle more frequently, and those same genes operate differently in women and men.
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But, a biologic explanation is also possible: hormonal effects on an imbalanced immune system may be the reason for the differential results. Further studies are needed to understand whether there is a biologic cause for the observed difference and its mechanism.
Shadman and colleagues state that common allergy treatments such as antihistamines and leukotriene agonists have not been shown to be linked to oncogenesis and are unlikely an explanation for the observations.
The study was able to analyze a large cohort of participants, however the allergies were self-reported and a detailed analysis of each person’s history of allergies was not available-only current allergies were reported in the study.

In a French observational study of patients with asthma more than 50% of participants had concomitant allergic rhinitis . Several narrative reviews showed this change in sex predominance favoring females during the transition from childhood to adulthood for diverse allergy-related diseases [4, 5, 25, 26]. Therefore, and since asthma and rhinitis coexist more often than expected , we hypothesized that also concomitant allergic rhinitis and asthma may undergo a similar sex-shift in prevalence during puberty.
Our results support this hypothesis to some extent. However, the limited number of studies found in adults did not allow us to clearly establish a clear tendency towards a male or female predominance but rather a balance between the sexes. Our pooled estimates relied only upon data from studies conducted in Asia (N = 7), South America (N = 2) and Africa (N = 1). In Pinart et al. a sex switch for allergic rhinitis prevalence around puberty was not found in studies conducted in Asia . Five of six studies in the youngest age group (0–10 years) were from Asia, whereas no Asian studies were found for adolescents (11–17 years), suggesting a considerable bias.
Concerning possible mechanisms underlying a higher prevalence of allergic diseases in women during and after adolescence, higher levels of sex hormones such as estrogen and progesterone were suggested to be of central importance . Sex hormones play a role in the homeostasis of immunity . Estrogen and progesterone enhance type 2 and suppress type 1 responses in females, whereas testosterone suppresses type 2 responses in males . Experiments in rodents showed an effect of estrogens on mast cell activation and the development of allergic sensitization, while progesterone can suppress histamine release but potentiate IgE induction . Similarly for asthma sex differences have been reported for different phenotypes and symptom profiles in epidemiological, clinical and experimental studies, however, the aetiology remains largely unclear [30,31,32,33].
Risk of bias
We tried to identify all population based studies reporting prevalence of coexisting allergic rhinitis and asthma. Given that such observational studies require large samples, it seems unlikely that a study of this dimension will have been published and not identified by our search. Furthermore, in population-based prevalence studies publication bias seems to be less of a concern than e.g. in interventional studies.

We have dealt with a lot of issues relating to females, but rather than specialising in "female only conditions" we find that so many come in with general health conditions that happen to affect everyone. It's just that women try to look after themselves infinitely more than their "Supermen" cohorts !!!. However it should be mentioned that differences like menstrual cycles, pregnancy and hormonal imbalances as well as a tendency to see a doctor more often ( which includes taking more medications like antibiotics and the contraceptive pill) can tip the scales towards certain conditions that men seem less likely to get.
We therefore treat a huge and diverse array of symptoms and conditions covering all three areas of primary health, Mind, Body and Spirit. And like all things they need to be in balance. It is interesting the importance that women place on recovery, health and wellbeing.
What we find more than anything with female clients in general, is how little attention has been paid to understanding and analysing their diets, stress, trauma, recovery and lifestyle as a whole by other healthcare providers. All too often we find that there has been so much emphasis on symptom recovery and management, that as soon as these treatments are stopped the underlying illness returns with the original symptoms.
By paying attention to detail, with understanding the factors associated with immune system and the effects that dietary and environmental toxicity has on female health, many of the significant and common causes for visiting an alternative practitioners are eliminated.
Every time I have a patient that tells me they have been diagnosed with breast cancer or some auto immune condition, the first response that I have is "So many people seem to develop this condition by having some kind of immense stress and trauma history - causing a breakdown in the immune response, therefore potentially leading to the condition". If you want to potentially reduce the chance of compromisation then try to improve immune health and offset the stress.
This can be significantly more effective once a correct dietary evaluation has been made.
FACT: 75% of my clientele are women, 20% are children (nearly always accompanied by women) with a mere 5% accounting for a few switched on Men. Everything from Poly cystic ovaries, candida, allergies, intolerance, rashes, fatigue, tummy issues to auto immune conditions can be potentially helped with identifying specific inflammatory and allergy / intolerant responses associated with food and environmental toxicity.
Make the right choice and start with what goes in, after all we are what we eat.

Slightly more American men than women develop cancer, and more men than women also die from cancer. For obvious reasons, breast cancer is more common in women. But other kinds of cancer, like stomach and liver cancer, are more frequently diagnosed in men. Some researchers believe this is partly due to a difference in smoking and drinking behaviors, but biological factors may also have something to do with it.
Protect yourself: Don’t smoke (duh), and drink less. Alcohol consumption has been linked with prostate cancer, breast cancer, stomach cancer and more, and Americans can be a boozy bunch. We’re ranked 25th in the world for per capita alcohol consumption, with the average American drinking the equivalent of 2.3 gallons of pure alcohol a year.
Colds and flu
Women catch more colds than men, but men may experience more symptoms when they do start sneezing. Estrogen (a female sex hormone) may offer women some protection from the flu virus and result in fewer symptoms.
Does this mean that the so-called man flu (defined by Oxford Dictionaries as “a cold or similar minor ailment as experienced by a man who is regarded as exaggerating the severity of the symptoms”) is a real thing? Maybe, but researchers suggest that cultural factors play a bigger role than biological ones. Sorry, guys.
Stay healthy: Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. Make natural immunity boosters like probiotics, garlic and echinacea your BFFs. If all else fails, watch a kitten sneeze on YouTube or giggle over an article like “17 Tweets You’ll Appreciate If Your Man Is a Giant Sick Baby”—laughter is a proven immune booster.
On average, women require 20 more minutes of shut-eye than men in order to feel well rested—so it makes sense that men tend to get less sleep. More women than men experience sleep problems like insomnia and restless legs syndrome.
Rest easy: Wake up and head to bed at the same time every day (yep, even on lazy Sundays). Moderate aerobic exercise may be especially helpful for those with insomnia—but try to avoid working out within the three hours before bedtime. Sleep supplements like magnesium or melatonin could also help you fall asleep faster and snooze more soundly.
Let’s talk about…
Sex and gender don’t actually mean the same thing. Sex refers to biological factors like reproductive function and hormones.

However, this is still speculation and a lot of further research needs to be conducted before a probable cause can be identified. The most staggering part of the research however was the rate of depression that was associated with asthma and the numbers gathered during the study showed that the depression rate surpassed that of several other much more serious problems like diabetes and even that of cancer survivors.
Young women ignore heart attach signs
In a recent study, there has been a new discovery that could be the answer to why women of a particular age group are having much more heart attacks as compared to men. The age group in question is 30-55 and according to the research which was conducted researchers by Yale, the women are more likely to ignore early warning signs of heart attack by thinking they may be occurring due to some other reason. The study involved interviewing women between 30 and 55 years of age and the results showed that women frequently ignored signs like dizziness and pain. The research strongly suggested that there is an immediate need to educate women at an early stage in identifying what the trigger points are and then being able to spot them in case they occur to anyone during the coming years of their lives. The study also strongly suggested towards the need of change in the attitude towards the problem in order to avoid any unnecessary complications including heart attacks.
Autoimmunity and exposure to mercury
Autoimmunity is a disease that occurs mostly in women where the body starts to produce antibodies that are against the body’s own tissues and that can cause serious health problems. According to a recent study, the key factor that may be inducing the risk of the onslaught of this problem is exposure to mercury. The exposure can happen in a number of different ways as suggested by the research e.g. through seafood. It was found that even at levels of exposure that are considered to be safe for the body, there were developments of autoimmunity cases in women. The thing that makes it difficult to address this issue is the fact that very little factual knowledge is available about the development of autoimmune disorder and therefore doing solid progress is extremely difficult. However, after this research, scientists have given a lot of stress that women, especially those in childbearing age should keep a proper track of their seafood consumption.
To find out more about issues and developments related to women’s health, you can visit this www.womenshealth.gov/news.

Pairwise LD, haplotype analysis, and SNP conditioning analysis suggest that these two SNPs in TAGAP are independent susceptibility alleles. Additional fine mapping of this gene and functional genomic studies of these SNPs should provide additional insight into the role of these genes in RA.
Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a sexually dimorphic autoimmune disease which is more common in women, but affected men often experience a more severe disease. The genetic basis of sexual dimorphism in SLE is not clearly defined. A study was undertaken to examine sex-specific genetic effects among SLE susceptibility loci.
A total of 18 autosomal genetic susceptibility loci for SLE were genotyped in a large set of patients with SLE and controls of European descent, consisting of 5932 female and 1495 male samples. Sex-specific genetic association analyses were performed. The sex–gene interaction was further validated using parametric and nonparametric methods. Aggregate differences in sex-specific genetic risk were examined by calculating a cumulative genetic risk score for SLE in each individual and comparing the average genetic risk between male and female patients.
A significantly higher cumulative genetic risk for SLE was observed in men than in women. (P = 4.52×10−8) A significant sex–gene interaction was seen primarily in the human leucocyte antigen (HLA) region but also in IRF5, whereby men with SLE possess a significantly higher frequency of risk alleles than women. The genetic effect observed in KIAA1542 is specific to women with SLE and does not seem to have a role in men.
The data indicate that men require a higher cumulative genetic load than women to develop SLE. These observations suggest that sex bias in autoimmunity could be influenced by autosomal genetic susceptibility loci.
High serum interferon α (IFNα) activity is a heritable risk factor for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Auto-antibodies found in SLE form immune complexes which can stimulate IFNα production by activating endosomal Toll-like receptors and interferon regulatory factors (IRFs), including IRF5. Genetic variation in IRF5 is associated with SLE susceptibility; however, it is unclear how IRF5 functional genetic elements contribute to human disease.

Preclinical research and drug development studies possess predominantly utilized male pet choices and cells also.4, 5, 6 It isn’t surprising a 2001 US Authorities Accountability Office record discovered that eight from the ten prescription medications withdrawn from the marketplace between 1997 and 2000 posed higher health risks for females than for males.7 Most financing agencies from European countries and THE UNITED STATES have implemented procedures to aid and mandate analysts to consider sex and gender whatsoever degrees of medical study.8 Still, the field of sex-based biology and medication is often seen as a specialised market, rather than a central consideration in medical research. Essential for the success of clinical care and translational science is awareness by clinicians and researchers that the diseases they are treating and studying are characterised by differences between women and men in epidemiology, pathophysiology, clinical manifestations, psychological effects, disease progression, and response to treatment. This Review explores the role of sex (biological constructs) and gender (social constructs) as modifiers of the most common causes of death and morbidity, and articulates the genetic, biological, and environmental determinants that underlie these differences. We aim to guide Morin hydrate clinicians and researchers to better understand and harness the importance of sex and gender as genetic, biological, and environmental modifiers of chronic disease. Ultimately, it is a necessary and fundamental step towards precision medication which will advantage women and men. Sex being a hereditary modifier of disease and biology Sex distinctions in disease prevalence, manifestation, and response to treatment are rooted in the hereditary differences between people. Genetic sex distinctions begin at conception when the ovum fuses using a sperm cell holding an X or a Y chromosome, leading to an embryo holding either XY or XX chromosomes. This fundamental difference in chromosome go with (eg, genes beyond your testis-determining gene) creates ubiquitous sex distinctions in the molecular make-up of most male and feminine cells.9 Initial, the Y chromosome bears genes that display subtle functional differences off their X-linked homologues (eg, and gene), which generates ubiquitous sex differences in the molecular makeup of most feminine and male cells. (B) Random inactivation of 1 X chromosome in feminine cells causes another degree of sex distinctions in gene appearance. Some X-linked genes get away inactivation in feminine individuals and also have a higher appearance in feminine than male people.

(COLUMBUS, Ohio) – Most pregnant women have heard theories and old wives’ tales about the differences between carrying a girl and a boy. Some say you can tell what a woman will have, simply based on the foods she craves or the way she looks.
But a new study, conducted by researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, has found some science behind the speculations. Researchers followed 80 women through pregnancy, exposing their immune cells to bacteria in the lab, and noticed some significant differences.
“What the findings showed is that women carrying girls exhibited greater inflammatory responses when faced with some sort of immune challenge compared to women carrying boys,” said Amanda Mitchell, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. “This could mean that inflammation may play a role in why some women who are carrying girls have more severe reactions to illnesses, making symptoms of conditions like asthma worse for them during pregnancy.”
Scientists found that immune cell samples of women carrying girls produced more proteins called proinflammatory cytokines than those carrying boys, which is part of the inflammatory response. “Too many of these cytokines or too much inflammation can really be unhelpful for our bodies’ functioning,” Mitchell said. “It can create or contribute to symptoms like fatigue or achiness.”
So, there’s now some evidence behind the notion that women carrying girls may be more likely to have a harder time with illnesses during pregnancy than if they were carrying a boy.

Estradiol promotes functional responses in inflammatory and steady-state dendritic cells through differential requirement for activation function-1 of estrogen receptor alpha. J Immunol. 2013;190:5459–70. pmid:23626011
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However, other potential factors such as social status and living habits cannot be ruled out without further study.
Jarrar D, Wang P, Cioffi WG, Bland KI, Chaudry IH. The female reproductive cycle is an important variable in the response to trauma-hemorrhage. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol. 2000;279(3):H1015–21.
Knoferl MW, Angele MK, Diodato MD, Schwacha MG, Ayala A, Cioffi WG, et al. Female sex hormones regulate macrophage function after trauma-hemorrhage and prevent increased death rate from subsequent sepsis. Ann Surg. 2002;235(1):105–12.
Knoferl MW, Jarrar D, Angele MK, Ayala A, Schwacha MG, Bland KI, et al. 17 beta-Estradiol normalizes immune responses in ovariectomized females after trauma-hemorrhage. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol. 2001;281(4):C1131–8.
Jarrar D, Wang P, Knoferl MW, Kuebler JF, Cioffi WG, Bland KI, et al. Insight into the mechanism by which estradiol improves organ functions after trauma-hemorrhage. Surgery. 2000;128(2):246–52.
Diodato MD, Knoferl MW, Schwacha MG, Bland KI, Chaudry IH. Gender differences in the inflammatory response and survival following haemorrhage and subsequent sepsis. Cytokine. 2001;14(3):162–9.
Deitch EA, Feketeova E, Lu Q, Zaets S, Berezina TL, Machiedo GW, et al. Resistance of the female, as opposed to the male, intestine to I/R-mediated injury is associated with increased resistance to gutinduced distant organ injury. Shock. 2008;29(1):78–83.
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Angele MK, Knoferl MW, Ayala A, Bland KI, Chaudry IH.

Autoimmune disease encompasses a diverse group of over 80 chronic disorders. Each of these diseases has distinct clinical manifestations that are due to the differences in the cells and organ systems involved; however, these diseases are universally characterized by a loss of self-tolerance, resulting in autoreactive immune cells, autoantibodies, and elevated levels of inflammatory cytokines. Reviews in this series examine mechanisms underlying autoimmunity, including failure of B cell tolerance checkpoints, the generation of autoantibodies, cytokine dysregulation, aberrant T cell signaling, and the loss of immune suppressive cells and functions. They also explore the influence of genetic background, environment, microRNAs, and sex-specific factors on the loss of immune homeostasis.
Autoimmune diseases classically present with a complex etiology in which different factors concur in the generation and maintenance of autoreactive immune responses. Some mechanisms and pathways that lead to the development of imbalanced immune homeostasis and loss of self-tolerance have been identified as common to multiple autoimmune disorders. This Review series focuses on the general concepts of development and progression to pathogenic autoimmune phenotypes. A mechanistic discussion of the most recent advances in the field, together with related considerations of possible therapies, make this series of particular interest to both the basic and translational science communities.
Antonio La Cava
Autoimmune diseases occur when the immune system attacks and destroys the organs and tissues of its own host. Autoimmunity is the third most common type of disease in the United States. Because there is no cure for autoimmunity, it is extremely important to study the mechanisms that trigger these diseases. Most autoimmune diseases predominantly affect females, indicating a strong sex bias. Various factors, including sex hormones, the presence or absence of a second X chromosome, and sex-specific gut microbiota can influence gene expression in a sex-specific way. These changes in gene expression may, in turn, lead to susceptibility or protection from autoimmunity, creating a sex bias for autoimmune diseases. In this Review we discuss recent findings in the field of sex-dependent regulation of gene expression and autoimmunity.
Kira Rubtsova, Philippa Marrack, Anatoly V. Rubtsov
In this Review we focus on the initiation of autoantibody production and autoantibody pathogenicity, with a special emphasis on the targeted antigens.

In the scientific publication, “Influence of Oral and Gut Microbiota in the Health of Menopausal Women,” (2017) in the 8th volume of Frontiers in Microbiology, authors Vieira, Castelo, Ribeiro and Ferreira explain how estrogen levels affect which microbes grow in the reproductive and gastrointestinal tract. This has a direct impact on rates of certain diseases commonly found in the post-menopausal female. This is a summary and interpretation of their findings.
The beautiful life of a female involves two important changes in estrogen levels: menarche and menopause. Menarche occurs during adolescence and marks the onset of menstruation and potential reproduction. The second change is during menopause, when menstruation ends and the ovaries become non-reproductive. Estrogen has a huge impact on her physical wellness, emotions, memory, sensitivity to pain, and even the microbes that grow in her reproductive and gastrointestinal tract.
For years, the medical community has known that there are differences in the rates of autoimmune diseases between men and women and even pre- and post-menopausal women. Although we have known about the impact of estrogen, the role of the natural microbes living in the female body is just starting to reveal itself. We now know that estrogen levels impact which microbes grow in the mouth, the gut and the reproductive tract (possibly other locations, as well). This has an impact on Periodontitis, Autoimmune Disease, Type I Diabetes, Osteoporosis and even Breast Cancer.
In the scientific publication, “Gut Microbiome, Metabolome, and Allergic Disease,” in the 66th volume of Allergology International, authors Hirata and Kunisawa explain how they have found a link between the food you eat and the products made by your gut bacteria that affect your overall health. This is a summary and interpretation of their findings.
NUT-FREE, GLUTEN-FREE, DAIRY-FREE…
How many times a week do you encounter a person with some sort of food allergy, or allergies in general? For me, it’s daily. Maybe they are lactose intolerant, or gluten-free, or peanut-free. Some people cannot eat raw vegetables without gas and bloating. My parents say, “it never used to be this way.” Back when I was starting kindergarten, we didn’t have “nut free” classrooms, or hallways.

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We set the space for our beginning in December... and in January we are heeding the Call To Adventure... locating our reference points in the body and mind as we embark on our healing path.
I read this blog post called Could Female Self-Hatred Be The Real Cause Of Autoimmune Disease? It's definitely worth a read. Sarah Wilson, who suffers from autoimmune disease has tried lots of remedies for her symptoms, and has realized that there's something else... something underneath the flare ups. Self-hatred. Tension. Anxiety. Not enough.
I often have clients who exhibit symptoms of autoimmune disease. A few have been diagnosed. And I'd posit that it's not unique to women, and that there's a second piece of the puzzle.
So... women. Yes, approximately 80% of the people diagnosed with autoimmune disease are women. This could be due to the differences in the immune system of men and women. It could also be that men and women will be found to have different symptoms of autoimmune disease. That remains to be seen. I suspect that men are going to be found to exhibit more neurological symptoms and nerve problems, whereas women have more inflammatory issues. That's just a guess based on a few male clients... so don't quote me on that. Besides, I'm not a doctor.
When I work with clients, we delve into their cellular function. We ask questions of the Whole Body Wisdom about what is happening there. And people with autoimmune disease often register as having a secondary infection... of pathogens that do not actively infect human tissues, but lay dormant, waiting for bacteria or viruses that they CAN infect to come by. These dormant colonies are the ones causing the inflammatory response, and yet they are not registered by the immune system because they are not virulent to humans. So, the conundrum... the body can see the EFFECTS of these things, but cannot locate them directly. Some days are good days when the colonies are very quiet, and other days they start communicating with one another to see if there has been an influx of cells that they can infect... and there's a "flare up".
Now, I can't diagnose, so when I'm with a client I stress that this is metaphorical. There are parallels between the body and the mind and the emotions... and the environment that shows up in one is likely to show up in another.

It is hardly a profound statement to observe that women are different than men, and very frequently the differences makes it important for health care practitioners to be aware of health problems that occur more commonly in the female population. Awareness of the above will often lead to better and more appropriate care for the female patient.
There are many diseases and disorders which are quite commonly seen in female patients that are much less commonly seen in men, such as the autoimmune diseases, however, women live significantly longer than do men. Unfortunately for the female population, they do experience more illness and have more "sick time" than do men on average.
In no way is this presentation to be considered "exhaustive" on the subject of female health Issues. Rather, the following is a discussion of several diseases and disorders which are commonly diagnosed in the optometric practice and which occur more frequently in the female patient than in the male patient. This is particularly important as optometrists are recognized as independent health care practitioners and are quite often the doctor of first contact when symptoms lead to a doctor's office visit by the patient.

Women with airborne allergies to plants, grass, and trees may have a moderate increased risk of developing blood cancers, according to a new study.
Women with airborne allergies to plants, different types of grass, and trees may have a moderate increased risk of developing blood cancers, according to a new cohort study. The same effect of was not seen in men with allergies. The results are published in the American Journal of Hematology.
“While no causality can be inferred, these results suggest a possible gender-specific role of chronic stimulation of the immune system for the development of hematologic cancers,” said the authors in their discussion.
Whether responses of the immune system to allergens or autoimmune responses correlate with the development of malignant blood cells is not clear. The link between allergies and hematologic malignancies has been previously analyzed in epidemiologic studies, but results have been inconsistent. Case-controlled studies have demonstrated an inverse relationship, while prospective studies have shown an increased risk of hematologic malignancies in those with allergies.
In the current study, Mazyar Shadman, MD, MPH, a senior fellow in the clinical research division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and colleagues analyzed a prospective cohort of 66,212 participants between the ages of 50 and 76 in the Vitamins and Lifestyle (VITAL) study. All participants were from the western part of the state of Washington, were enrolled between 2000 and 2002, and were followed through 2009.
A total of 681 subjects developed a hematologic malignancy during the 8-year follow-up period. The participants diagnosed with these cancers were more likely to be men, to have two or more close relatives with a history of leukemia or lymphoma, and to have reported their health status as low.
After taking into account factors associated with blood cancer risk, a history of airborne allergy was associated with an increased risk of blood cancer (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.19; P = .039). The link was only for those individuals who had allergies to plants, trees, and grass, and was strongest for mature B-cell lymphomas (HR = 1.5; P = .005). This association was seen in women (HR = 1.47; P = .004), but not men (HR = 1.03; P = .782).
The authors speculate that the increased risk for blood cancer development among women may reflect their inherent lower baseline risk of developing these cancers.

At least, I don’t care as it relates to my specific work with individual clients. I understand that classification matters for further study, etc., but as far as my day-in day-out work with people, the classification is irrelevant.
What I care about most is what causes fibromyalgia and what makes it better or worse. Here’s how I share my view on classification. We often hear the old phrase, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s likely a duck.” To me, when it comes to fibromyalgia, I don’t focus on whether or not it’s a duck. I focus on how it walks and how it quacks!
Fibromyalgia walks and quacks like autoimmune conditions. For that reason, I study them both, find treatments and protocols that work for both, and will continue to look for solutions that positively impact both challenges.
The vital difference between genetics and gene expression
Have you been told that your health challenges are all in your genes? Have any of your family members been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and/or other co-existing autoimmune conditions?
The study of genes – and more importantly, gene expression – is a vital component in the gender question regarding fibromyalgia.
We are more than just our genes.
Our body’s signals (hormones) have the ability to literally tell our genes when and how to act. Some genes are static while others turn on and off like switches. (3) It’s this switching process (gene expression) which provides the most hope for a healthy future.
The study of epigenetics floods a beacon of hope on an otherwise misleading portrait of a bleak future. Epigenetics studies the outside factors that affect gene expression. Factors such as nutrition, relationships, and beliefs have a profound and lasting impact on our risks of developing disease and our ability to heal from chronic health challenges. Be sure to check out the resources at the end of this article for more details on this topic.
For now, here are three main factors to review that reflect reasons why females are more likely to suffer from fibromyalgia and autoimmune challenges than males.
1) Reactions to stress
Identifying the differences in how men react to stress as opposed to women is both simple and complicated. It’s simple to observe how men – in general – seem to disengage from others when under stress, while women are more likely to engage and actually seek out social connections.

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As winter and cold weather rolls in, flu season also comes into play. With the increasing sickness, the term “man flu” also begins to more frequently appear.
The term is so well-known that Oxford Dictionary defined it in an entry.
“A cold or similar minor ailment as experienced by a man who is regarded as exaggerating the severity of the symptoms,” the entry reads.
While men are widely considered to embellish their symptoms in comparison to women, there are numerous studies that find some truth to the increased severity in their symptoms.
A new Canadian analysis, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on Dec. 11, put the "man flu" in the spotlight this week.
Study Author Dr. Kyle Sue explores "whether men are wimps or just immunologically inferior."
"Tired of being accused of over-reacting, I searched the available evidence to determine whether men really experience worse symptoms and whether this could have any evolutionary basis," Sue stated in the study.
Sue analyzed studies related to respiratory diseases, the common cold, intensive care, the flu and viral infections. He compared the symptoms between men and women.
Sue found that a man's immune system may be naturally weaker than a woman's.
He found that with some illnesses, especially respiratory diseases, men are more susceptible to complications and exhibit a higher mortality.
Some studies suggest that women are more responsive to influenza vaccinations than men, according to the analysis.
Now is the time to protect yourself from the flu
6 unexpected ways winter affects your health
5 ways your body combats cold weather's harsh impacts
Why your blood pressure can spike when it's cold outside
5 common Seasonal Affective Disorder myths debunked
Seasonal influenza data from from 2004 to 2010 in Hong Kong suggested that when the flu strikes, adult men face a greater risk for being admitted to the hospital.
Another American study found that men seem to face a higher risk for dying from the flu than women, according to the analysis.
Hormonal differences in the genders most likely cause these results. The masculine hormone testosterone suppresses the immune system, while the feminine hormone estradiol is immunoprotective.
From his research, Sue concluded that there was a gender "immunity gap" but stressed that this is “certainly not definitive.”
The new research on the "man flu" has been met by mixed reviews on social media.

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Saved by Her Meds
Surprising, isn't it? The smoke of even a hundred unfiltered Camels couldn't compare with the thick, venomous air Iucciolino encountered at Ground Zero. Yet thanks to daily medication to reduce both airway constriction and inflammation—the two hallmarks of the disease—Iucciolino didn't have the kind of respiratory problems hundreds of others on the scene later developed (a condition referred to as "World Trade Center cough").
"After 3 years of searching for the right medication in the right combination with stress relief and physical activity, such as yoga, to maintain my lung capacity, I was very protected," she says. "My asthma was totally under control. And still is."
Not Child's Play
More than 14 million Americans have asthma. Of these, almost 5 million are children. The rest—more than 9 million—are adults, some of whom, like Iucciolino, didn't have the disease as children. In fact, of those diagnosed in adulthood, the majority are women.
"Most people don't tend to think of asthma as a women's issue. But it really is," says Kathleen A. Sheerin, MD, an asthma specialist in private practice with the Atlanta Allergy and Asthma Clinic, and founder of the nonprofit asthma-education group, Breathe Georgia. In fact, studies are just beginning to reveal real differences in the male and female experience of asthma, despite the fact that asthma, in both the sexes, is caused primarily by inflammation in the airways, a seemingly gender-neutral problem. Yet not only do more women than men have asthma, women with asthma tend to experience more discomfort than men with asthma who have the same degree of airway obstruction. And as a result, they report more symptoms, take more drugs, and seek more health care than men with the same disease.
For instance, one recent study at the Yale-New Haven Hospital found that high-risk female patients were admitted twice as often as high-risk males and tended to have longer admissions (5 days for women versus 4 days for men—even though the women, in general, didn't appear to be as sick as the men when they arrived at the ER. Scientists aren't sure why there's such a disparity. But studies suggest that, in part, the excess burden of asthma in women may be due to hormones.

RA is an autoimmune condition experienced more commonly by females than males and is thought to occur or result from a combination of factors including genetic, environment and other unknown events that occur within our bodies (Pollard 2012).

Current treatments for lupus carry a serious risk of infection and malignancy that can contribute to morbidity and mortality. Further research can help identify targets for new and potentially safer therapies, according to the study.
“As VGLL3 appears to be not only constitutively active in women but also turned on in men with SLE, targeting VGLL3 may prove beneficial in patients of both sexes,” the researchers wrote.
Billi AC, Gharaee-Kermani M, Fullmer J, et al. The female-biased factor VGLL3 drives cutaneous and systemic autoimmunity. JCI Insight. 2019. Doi: 10.1172/jci.insight.127291

The reasons for this trend are not fully understood, but they are believed to be caused by the dietary habits, such as increased consumption of processed food, and the higher amounts of preservatives, flavor enhancers, and other additives in our food. Some genetic and demographic factors are believed to play a role as well.
Some studies have shown that the percentage of women who think they have food allergy is much higher than that of women whose food allergy has been actually diagnosed. Since food intolerance and allergy are two different bodily reactions, it is essential to properly diagnose them to prevent serious health complications. Be sure to check out the available allergy tests that can clear up any uncertainties and find the cause of your allergies at last.

Why Women Get More Fibromyalgia, IBS, and Anxiety Than Men
By Dr. David M. Brady and Danielle Moyer, MS
The occurrence of fibromyalgia is 10 to 20 times higher in women than in men . Those women are also more likely than men to have severe tender points of pain, “pain all over”, sleep disturbances, and fatigue .
The incidence of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is higher in women when compared to men. Internationally, the prevalence of IBS is 67% higher in women .
Anxiety disorders are more than twice as likely to occur in women when compared to men .
The question is: why?
Though the reasons are still being studied, research suggests that an interaction between biology, psychology, and sociocultural factors leads to higher occurrences of these diseases in women . Of particular interest is the role of women’s hormonal and nervous systems, which respond somewhat differently to stress and trauma than those of men .
Research by the American Psychological Association looked at 290 studies between 1980 and 2005 to determine if men or women were more at risk for potentially traumatic events and PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder). The results concluded that, although men experience more traumatic events on average than women, women are more likely to meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD. PTSD is an anxiety disorder caused by a traumatic event and symptoms include “re-experiencing the trauma, avoidance and numbing and hyperarousal .” PTSD occurs in 10-12% of women and 5-6% of men, making the rate in women almost double . Women’s PTSD also tends to last longer (on average four years), whereas men’s lasts one year on average .
The types of trauma men and women experience are different as well. Men are more likely to experience trauma from natural disasters, human-caused disasters, accidents, and combat, whereas women are more likely to experience trauma from domestic violence, sexual abuse, and sexual assault . Sexual trauma has been shown to be particularly toxic to mental health, and can typically begin at a young age when the brain is still developing . This can impact a woman's fear and stress response well into adulthood.
Trauma, stressors, and/or PTSD alter pain processing and incoming stimuli in an individual. They can frequently cause an excessive stress response, significant and chronic pain, and central sensitization disorders .

The scientific academies did not accept women members.
To gain acceptance,
many women researchers today avoid conducting research about women. Those
women who "succeed" are generally keen on emphasizing that they
are not feminists and that they are never discriminated against. Despite
this low-profile, there are a few women who have reached influential positions
in the male-dominated world of science.
THE SECOND EXPLANATION FOR WHY WE KNOW LESS about women's diseases than men's is that clinical tests on women are consciously avoided because of the inherent risks, not for the woman herself but to the foetus. This relates in particular to clinical drug trials and goes back to the tragedies that came of pregnant women taking pills of thalidomide: 10,000 babies were born with serious malformations.
Therefore initial drug testing uses mainly men, young men, often medical students, or men doing their military service, as subjects. In most Western countries women who volunteer as subjects for initial drug trials must prove that they don't have "child-bearing potential", which can mean providing a written affidavit that they are taking both contraceptive pills and have an IUD. This is of course unusual. Only in later phases of the trials are women generally included in the tests.
Can results of tests mainly carried out on men always be considered applicable to women?
No, drugs used for diagnosis or treatment often have a different effect on men and women. Men's and women's bodies metabolize drugs differently. We also know that women's monthly menstrual cycles can influence the effect of a drug.
When the drug eventually moves from the laboratory into the home we therefore don't know how it will affect women and the elderly.
actual test period for women is when the drug is used at hospitals or
prescribed by a doctor. What was unethical during the first controlled
testing phase is no longer an issue, with the release of drugs to the
public after tests mainly conducted on men (and on mail mice!). In the
later phases, when the drug is approved, there is less emphasis on taking
extreme caution. Eventual side-effects, damages and birth defects are
reported and complemented with epidemiological studies. Approval of a
new drug is a process that takes up to ten years.

Besides Graves' disease, MS, and diabetes, the incidence of Crohn's disease, atopic dermatitis, rhinitis and asthmas, has also risen in recent years, particularly in children.
The incidence of allergic and autoimmune diseases isn't evenly distributed among geographic regions or ethnic groups. However, a decrease in incidence is seen from north to south in the Northern Hemisphere and from south to north in the Southern Hemisphere. This could be accounted for by the prevalence of adaptive immune system HLA genes seen in different populations, for instance the low incidence of immune system genes that provide susceptibility to diabetes in Japan and the high incidence of these genes in Sardinia.
However, the genetic influences are considered small compared to the environmental contributions including access to medical care, antibiotics and vaccinations. This is supported by the low incidence of systemic lupus erythematosus among western Africans compared to black Americans of the same ancestry.
Daycare Decreases Risk
Children attending daycare centers, who presumably have more infectious exposure, also have a lower incidence of autoimmune asthma than children in small families who do not attend daycare facilities. Children who use antibiotics during the first year of life are also reported to have a higher incidence of autoimmune asthma in later life. This is related to the change in immune system chemicals called cytokines caused by the use of antibiotics.
Children raised in rural areas who have more exposure to farm animals and cow's milk also have a lower incidence of autoimmune diseases. Children born by caesarean section or who have isolated living conditions have a higher incidence of type 1 diabetes, whereas children exposed to lactobacillus vaginal flora at birth have a lower incidence of autoimmune conditions, particularly atrophic dermatitis.
The immune system is designed to protect and defend us from infectious agents. When its functions are altered, the immune response is erratic. Over time, an erratic response cripples immune function. In its effort to protect us, the immune system cells react skittishly, targeting our body's proteins. Iatrogenic diseases are those caused by doctors or medical treatment. A perfect iatrogenic disease model can be seen in autoimmune diseases.
Anecdotal evidence also shows that exposure to infectious diseases is associated with decreased symptoms when immune-related diseases do occur. For instances, children who have had measles have milder cases of nephritic syndrome and atopic dermatitis when they develop these diseases.

| Autoimmune diseases are the number one category of disease in the United States cancer and heart disease are triggered by autoimmune process; they affect approximately 5%–8% of the population or 14–22 million persons . Autoimmune diseases can affect virtually every site in the body, including the endocrine system, connective tissue, gastrointestinal tract, heart, skin, and kidneys. At least 15 diseases are known to be the direct result of an autoimmune response, while circumstantial evidence implicates >80 conditions with autoimmunity . In several instances, such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and myocarditis, the autoimmune disease can be induced experimentally by administering self-antigen in the presence of adjuvant (collagen, myelin basic protein, and cardiac myosin, respectively) . An important unifying theme in autoimmune diseases is a high prevalence in women . Conservative estimates indicate that 6.7 million or 78.8% of the persons with autoimmune diseases are women .|
Soon after autoimmune diseases were first recognized more than a century ago, researchers began to associate them with viral and bacterial infections. Autoimmune diseases tend to cluster in families and in individuals (a person with one autoimmune disease is more likely to get another), which indicates that common mechanisms are involved in disease susceptibility. Studies of the prevalence of autoimmune disease in monozygotic twins show that genetic as well as environmental factors (such as infection) are necessary for the disease to develop. Genetic factors are important in the development of autoimmune disease, since such diseases develop in certain strains of mice (e.g., systemic lupus erythematosus or lupus in MRL mice) without any apparent infectious environmental trigger. However, a body of circumstantial evidence links diabetes, multiple sclerosis, myocarditis, and many other autoimmune diseases with preceding infections . More often, many different microorganisms have been associated with a single autoimmune disease, which indicates that more than one infectious agent can induce the same disease through similar mechanisms . Since infections generally occur well before the onset of symptoms of autoimmune disease, clinically linking a specific causative agent to a particular autoimmune disease is difficult . This difficulty raises the question of whether autoimmune diseases really can be attributed to infections.

Medical school curricula need to differentiate between women’s health and sex-specific medicine, and emphasize the equal importance of the latter. A survey and study conducted by Jenkins and colleagues in the journal Biology of Sex Differences in 2016, most medical students nationwide felt that they were not properly educated on sex-specific medicine, and that, based on their education, they would not feel prepared to treat their patients using that technique. The literature is available and convincing. Practicing sex-specific medicine is essential for ensuring accurate diagnosis and it cannot be ignored.
MEN ARE FROM MARS Males store fat among organs, while females store fat in a ring around the abdomen. Thatâ€™s why you can
typically tell gender from an MRI and why liposuction is easier on women.
Female registered nurses make on average 5% less than their male counterparts, even though 90% of nurses are females.
Males are more likely than females to suffer from almost all diseases. Of the few exceptions are osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis and breast cancer.
The skulls of men and women can be distinguished by the maleâ€™s heavier mandible, rounder and broader brow bone and larger occipital protuberance.
There are many different gene differences between men and women in the liver. This is why men and women metabolize drugs like Tylenol or alcohol so differently.
Males tend to have more muscle above the torso, while females tend to have more muscle below the torso. The difference is about 15%.
ANNIKA CARTER, WAYLAND YEUNG GALIT DESHE
38 GENDER AND SEXUALITY
Male doctors are 2x more likely to be sued Men have more standard deviation in IQ than women...In both directions!
On average, women live 7 years longer than men.
Male brains are typically better at spatial cognition.
On average, females have a higher body fat percentage, at 26% compared to males at 13%.
TOP 10 LEADING CAUSES OF DEATH 1
CANCER (ANY TYPE)
CHRONIC LOWER RESPIRATORY DISEASES
INFLUENZA AND PNEUMONIA
NEPHRITIS, NEPHROTIC SYNDROME, OR NEPHROSIS 9
WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS WWW.PREMEDMAG.ORG
What does the term “patient advocate” mean to you?

This web page was produced as an assignment for an undergraduate course at Davidson College.
Sex Differences in the Gut Microbiome
From the August, 18 2012 cover of "The Economist"
The following is a review of the article "Sex Differences in the Gut Microbiome Drive Hormone-Dependent Regulation of Autoimmunity" by Janet Markle et al. A full citation and link to the article can be found at the bottom of this webpage. All quotations, facts and data presented in this review are drawn from this article unless otherwise cited.
A Brief Summary...
Autoimmune disorders, such as type 1 diabetes, have been shown to be more prevalent in women. Markle et al. look at this discrepancy and begin to untangle the relationship between such sex biases, microbiomes, and hormone levels. At the center of the paper lies the observation that nonobese diabetic (NOD) mice kept in GF (germ free) conditions do not exhibit the autoimmune disorder sex bias towards females. Conversely, mice kept in SPF (specific pathogen free) conditions do exhibit the sex bias towards female development of T1D. Thus, it seems that microbes are somehow involved in the different susceptibilities of the sexes to autoimmune diseases.
To further analyze this relationship, Markle et al. galvage female mice with either female or male gut microbiomes. The analysis of these mice show that female rats gavaged with male microbiomes exhibit T1D less frequently than untreated females and females gavaged with female microbiomes. Females gavaged with male microbiomes are also shown to have lower instances of T1D precursor phenotypes, such as insilitus (inflamed islet cells) and insulin-specific autoantibodies (Aabs). These results suggest that differences in microbiomes are at play in the sex-dependent susceptibilities to T1D and other autoimmune disorders.
Additionally, Markle et al.’s data indicate that the transplanted male microbiomes affect the recipient female’s testosterone levels. Females gavaged with male microbiomes exhibit higher testosterone levels than control females and those that receive female microbiomes. When females gavaged with male microbiomes are treated with a testosterone inhibitor, their increased protection from T1D and its precursor phenotypes decrease.
This paper does a lot. This five-page paper represents the conglomeration of a dozen different experiments.

Women tend to communicate more effectively than men, focusing on how to create a solution that works for the group, talking through issues, and utilizes non-verbal cues such as tone, emotion, and empathy whereas men tend to be more task-oriented, less talkative, and more isolated. Men have a more difficult time understanding emotions that are not explicitly verbalized, while women tend to intuit emotions and emotional cues. These differences explain why men and women sometimes have difficulty communicating and why men-to-men friendships look different from friendships among women.
Men tend to have a “fight or flight” response to stress situations while women seem to approach these situations with a “tend and befriend” strategy. Psychologist Shelley E. Taylor coined the phrase “tend and befriend” after recognizing that during times of stress women take care of themselves and their children (tending) and form strong group bonds (befriending). The reason for these different reactions to stress is rooted in hormones. The hormone oxytocin is released during stress in everyone. However, estrogen tends to enhance oxytocin resulting in calming and nurturing feelings whereas testosterone, which men produce in high levels during stress, reduces the effects of oxytocin.
Two sections of the brain responsible for language were found to be larger in women than in men, indicating one reason that women typically excel in language-based subjects and in language-associated thinking. Additionally, men typically only process language in their dominant hemisphere, whereas women process language in both hemispheres. This difference offers a bit of protection in case of a stroke. Women may be able to recover more fully from a stroke affecting the language areas in the brain while men may not have this same advantage
Women typically have a larger deep limbic system than men, which allows them to be more in touch with their feelings and better able to express them, which promotes bonding with others. Because of this ability to connect, more women serve as caregivers for children. The down side to this larger deep limbic system is that it also opens women up to depression, especially during times of hormonal shifts such as after childbirth or during a woman’s menstrual cycle.
Men and women perceive pain differently. In studies, women require more morphine than men to reach the same level of pain reduction. Women are also more likely to vocalize their pain and to seek treatment for their pain than are men.

Note that Wedekind is not the first to offer this
hypothesis: it was Carole Ober who first presented such a scenario in
1993 during the annual meeting of a Genetics group--sorry I forgot their
>There are major aspects of immune function and dysfunction which
>appear to be markedly different in males and females. This probably
>has more to do with the close coupling of the physiological axes
>that are involved with reproduction (e.g. LHRH-LH) with the HPA axis
>and the autonomic nervous system than with specific patterns of
>antigens arising from X and Y chromosomes. The immune system in
>females must also be designed not to reject the immunologically
>different sperm and fetus, by a mechanism which is still not
Recently it came to my attention that gonadotropin-releasing hormone
(GnRH or as Alan states: LHRH) receptors have been found in the adrenal
glands of rats. If they turn up in other mammals, and in humans, this
would suggest to me that GnRH may be having direct effects on the
adrenals, which might help to explain some of the immunological
>There is considerable speculation that homosexuality arises from a
>developmental variation in the fetal brain that is the result of
>maternal (and or fetal) hormonal and immunological dysregulation.
>But it is still just speculation.
Nonetheless, this speculation has grounding in the early embryonic
migration of GnRH neurosecretory neurons--a process that may be effected
by many factors--some of which Teresa is most familiar with. My focus was
on how many GnRH neurosecretory neurons innervate the hypothalamus (and,
in general) the limbic system. Not enough empirical data so far, or I
haven't found it. Still, it seems likely that the number of these neurons
contributes to differences in hypothalamic GnRH pulsatility, which seems
very important not only to sex differences, but to differences in sexual
orientation. Of course, this gets into some complex and controversial
issues that are better discussed after reading either a book, or a
journal article/review. The Scent of Eros was written for a general
(though educated) audience. I have submitted a more technical paper.

Why do Women Live Longer than Men?
It was reported that the research conducted on people who lived for 100 years in Harvard University has revealed that ‘menopause’ is the cause for difference in life spans of males and females. According to the geriatrician, Thomas Perls at Harvard University, there are two reasons for the extension in the lifespan of females compared to that of males. The transfer of genes from one generation to the next in the evolution is one and the necessity to give birth to a child is another. As the woman has to remain healthy to give birth to as many children as possible before menopause, woman has to be healthy for long time.
Menopause is a line that separates the life of women into two parts. It prevents the aged women not to bear the child as it is risky for them. The menopause gives strength and life to the woman to take care of her children and grand children. Men according to Perls will only carry the genes and transfer them to the next generation.
In most of the countries, it was surveyed that women lived longer than men. In United States, the average life span of women was 79 years while that of men was 72 years. This gap in gender is mostly seen in those who lived more than 100 years. Females have two X-chromosomes as sex chromosomes while males have 1 X-chromosome and 1 Y-chromosome. The genes that are present on the Y-chromosome in male might undergo alterations which might be the result of illness. As the genes will get expressed whether they are recessive or dominant due to only one allele, men are susceptible to illness very early than females. It is reported that females will be prone to heart attacks 10 years later than males. The X-chromosome saves the presence of any gene that code for illness, if it is recessive by the dominant allele of it present in another X-chromosome. So, women will be less prone to diseases or illnesses. This might also be a reason for the reduced life span of males over females.

THUS, WE CAN NOT AUTOMATICALLY ASSUME THAT because of women's higher degree of health care consumption and absence from work because of illness, that they are sicker and feel worse than men. It is important to clarify the gender-specific differences between mortality and morbidity rates, number of official sick leaves, hospital care and drug consumption versus health. The level of illness (which in most countries is recorded through the occurrence of sick leave from work, occupational injuries and early retirement) is very sensitive to market conditions and changes in government and their policies. The questions we should be asking are rather: how do our behaviour and responses vary between generations, concerning sick leave, hospital care and drug consumption, and how through time and between cultures do we differ and what effect has gender on health?
I maintain that women per se cannot be said to be sicker than men, but rather see themselves as sick and feel unwell as well. If you constantly view and treat a person as sick, some will of course be just that. And this relationship doesn't necessarily have anything to do with women's longer life expectancy.
These seven explanations for women's higher degree of illness and sick leave than men ought to be part of a more general theory concerning ill health and disease. As is well known, there are a countless number of more or less gifted, so-called scientific models which claim to explain the occurrence and causes of disease. Nevertheless, it is interesting that in general these models do not take up the differences between the sexes. The seven approaches for women's illness which are discussed above do not in general exist in these models. Scientific models have often more to do with different genetic/physiological, social, psychological and cultural aspects without making distinctions between the sexes. Thus, there is a need for models which approach physiological, psychological, structural and cultural positions from a gender perspective.
We need to develop different methodologies which are less masculine and less oriented to the industrialized Western world's way of thinking. It must also include both epistemological and cosmological aspects.
But to be successful in the analysis and building of scientific models we also need to know more about the different male and female mentalities that thrives beneath the surface.
FOR THE PURPOSE OF ANALYZING WHY WE KNOW SO much less about female diseases and health than we know about male, I have deliberately chosen an expression which isn't a proper word in the English language - "unknowledge".

He and his team looked at 15 studies involving more than 2,000 men and women with Alzheimer's.
`Our findings indicated brain functions are more severely and more widely affected in women than men with Alzheimer's. For some reason, men are able to resist Alzheimer's for longer.
`This is still being studied, but one theory is that men have better "cognitive reserve" - for the generation developing Alzheimer's now, many of the women would have stayed at home while the men were working, which could have permitted them to keep their brains more active for longer. So, when the disease starts they can hold up better.'
Men CAN multi-task. The cliche that men can't do two things at once is not, in fact, correct - at least not entirely. `The evidence on multi-tasking is inconclusive,' says clinical psychologist Dr Genevieve von Lob at City Psychology Group in London.
`Studies tend to show inconsistent results - some find that women show slightly more superiority while others find men show slightly more superiority, depending on the task.'
Women multi-task much more often. A study published two years ago in the American Sociological Review looking at 500 families found that both parents spent a lot of time multi-tasking, but women multi-tasked 48 hours a week compared with 39 for the men.
The women's multi-tasking mostly involved housework and childcare. `So perhaps women multi-task more, not because they are naturally better at it, but because the need to juggle work and family life,' says Dr von Lob.
Women are more prone to depression. Women are twice as likely to experience major depression as men and are particularly prone during hormonal changes. `The overall evidence suggests the sexes process emotions differently,' says Dr Moir. `There are a few differences in the limbic area or emotional processing area of the brain that make it more likely that women take a more negative view of situations and are more likely to worry about problems. This upsets sleep patterns, and if you don't sleep you get depressed.'
Dr Abel adds that these differences may be due to hormones. `Differences in the physical structure of a woman compared to a man's brain is in part caused by genes and in part by the differences in hormones the brain "sees",' she says. Women's brains have more receptors for recognising the presence of oestrogen than men.

Genes show gender differences
Thousands of genes behave differently in the same organs of males and females, researchers report, a finding that may help explain why men and women have different responses to drugs and diseases.
Their study of brain, liver, fat and muscle tissue from mice show that gene expression, the level of activity of a gene, varies greatly according to sex.
The same is almost certainly true of humans, the team at the University of California Los Angeles report.
"This research holds important implications for understanding disorders such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity, and identifies targets for the development of gender-specific therapies," says Jake Lusis, a professor of human genetics who worked on the study.
Writing in the August issue of the journal Genome Research, the researchers say that even in the same organ, scores of genes vary in expression levels between the sexes.
The smallest differences are in brain tissue.
"We saw striking and measurable differences in more than half of the genes' expression patterns between males and females," says Dr Thomas Drake, a professor of pathology.
"We didn't expect that. No one has previously demonstrated this genetic gender gap at such high levels."
Xia Yang, a postdoctoral fellow in cardiology who led the study, says the implications are important.
"Males and females share the same genetic code, but our findings imply that gender regulates how quickly the body can convert DNA to proteins," Yang says. "This suggests that gender influences how disease develops."
In liver tissue, the findings imply male and female livers function the same, but at different rates.
"Our findings in the liver may explain why men and women respond differently to the same drug," Lusis says.
"Studies show that aspirin is more effective at preventing heart attack in men than women. One gender may metabolise the drug faster, leaving too little of the medication in the system to produce an effect."
Yang adds: "Many of the genes we identified relate to processes that influence common diseases. This is crucial, because once we understand the gender gap in these disease mechanisms, we can create new strategies for designing and testing new sex-specific drugs.

Scientists have wondered why people in Western countries get more asthma, allergies and autoimmune diseases than people from countries where hygiene is a problem. So William Parker, a researcher from Duke University in North Carolina, collected wild rats to compare their immune systems with those of animals raised in clean, laboratory conditions. He explains, "There's a really good chance that parasites and other infections change the immune system in a way that you don't have a propensity or a tendency to get allergies or autoimmune disease."
The wild rats - not surprisingly - were riddled with diseases and parasites. But Parker found -surprisingly - that they didn't react to common allergens the way the lab rats did. "So our wild rats' immune system is having a lot of things to worry about and it doesn't sweat the little things." He gives an example of a common allergen. "A little pollen grain that's coming by, it's going to just ignore that, whereas the person who's living in a very clean environment, or the lab rat, might be very concerned about a pollen grain and in fact might become allergic against it."
This finding is in line with a theory that says people from countries where there is widespread use of antiseptics end up developing more allergies than people from places with less sanitary living conditions. Parker says his findings also suggest people's immune systems need to be challenged more by dirt and disease during childhood. But he says that's difficult to test in humans. "You know a lot of people say if you let your kids get dirty they won't get allergies and autoimmune diseases. But doctors don't recommend that because we live in such crowded conditions that we get other diseases.
Parker is collecting more wild rats for further study.

The National Academy of Sciences and others have reported that 15% of the population suffers from chemical sensitivity, 3% to 5% of whom cannot hold jobs due to their intolerance of substances like perfume, chemicals and carpeting. Spinal fluid analysis by Dr. Baraniuk in 2005 has linked chemical sensitivity to Gulf War Syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia.
Men vs. Women and Chemical Sensitivity
Environmental illnesses (chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia) occur four times more often in women than men. Women are often dismissed because they simply 'look crazy' while in reality, they are toxic. The mental changes are related to: a lack of oxygen to the brain from inflamed vessels due to the poison they have absorbed, high adrenaline and low cortisol, a severely damaged autonomic nervous system and direct toxicity from whatever toxin is the cause (such as mold, mercury or toluene).
When a male-female couple has been exposed to toxigenic mold, pesticides from tenting or spraying, or other chemicals such as formaldehyde in new kitchen cabinets, women often experience symptoms first and often different symptoms than men. They have classic chemical sensitivity symptoms: "I am exhausted, depressed and sometimes frantic. But my husband does not find perfume, air fresheners and the detergent aisle of the grocery store offensive. Yet he is mean and belligerent, is losing his memory, his balance and has skin problems, but people think he is fine and that I am the fruitcake." For this they often separate.
Studies done by the military may suggest the reason for the inequality among the sexes in the chemical response. In a 1998 study, trichothecene exposure in female rats led to adrenal necrosis or death. Interestingly, giving females or neutered male rats testosterone prevented adrenal damage. This illustrates why men, with ten-fold higher levels of testosterone than women, have less incidence of fatigue, stress intolerance, allergy, inflammation and chemical sensitivity. It also points to the possible benefit of hormones, such as testosterone, being given to women with chemical exposure.
Why Horse Women are Crazy
In a pilot study, I found that horses, because they eat mold-containing hay and grain, have measurable amounts of trichothecene in their urine. When tested, the horses' sweat, as well as the horse dust also have measurable levels of this dangerous poison.

Are there differences in the health problems women and men experience and, if so, how might we explain them?
The common belief has been that "women are sicker but men die quicker": that women are more likely to report health problems whereas men have a shorter life expectancy. Other recent research shows that gender differences in health are less clear than is often assumed. [4, 27, 28] The general measures of health status as well as the specific measures of mental and physical health problems used in the NPHS indicate different patterns with respect to gender: in some cases no differences between women and men; in others, small or inconsistent differences. Yet women are more likely to report short-term disability, distress, depression, migraine, pain, arthritis or rheumatism, and non-food allergies.
Such observations in several countries have led to calls for much more attention to gender and the changing nature of gender roles. It has been argued that with changes in gender roles and the recognition of diversity among both men and women, some men may have more in common with some women.  But there are some fairly consistent gender differences, and we need greater documentation of these as well as of the ways in which men's health and women's health are similar. To understand such data and to lay the basis for meaningful analysis of gender and health, it is important to chart gender relations over time.
We do not know enough about how gender relations have been changing over the past few decades, and this complicates the task of tracing links between health and gender.  Women have entered the labour market in greater numbers, though they are typically employed in part-time work and in lower-paid "women's jobs," which often allow workers less autonomy and control in their work. While women may now have a greater degree of economic independence than previously, their relation with the labour market is still weaker than that of men. However, men, who at one time could expect almost continuous employment until retirement at 65, now face the prospect of redundancies and long-term unemployment as a result of restructuring and changes in the labour market. Charles has argued that these and other changes in gender relations mean that the "old ways of being a man are no longer possible." . The increase in divorce rates has had a profound effect on many women, who are immediately upon divorce faced with a considerable drop in household income and in their command of other resources. As lone parents they are at high risk of living in poverty.

The dominant theory is that the immune system creates these antibodies against some kind of invader that “looks like” some type of body tissue, meaning that antibodies created to fight off the intruder will bind to that specific type of tissue as well. This is called “molecular mimicry.”
Molecular mimicry makes sense, has been demonstrated to occur, and can explain a great deal about autoimmunity, including perhaps why an infection is often the apparent trigger for autoimmune disease. But molecular mimicry by itself cannot explain the totality of autoimmune phenomena. First off, in an age of decreasing incidence of acute infectious disease, it cannot explain why autoimmune conditions used to be rare and are getting more and more common. The immune system has been creating antibodies to fight off pathogen invasion in the body since humans first walked the earth. Why have our bodies suddenly become so bad at distinguishing self from invading pathogen?
Does Vaccine-Stimulated Immune Activation Play a Role?
This increase could be explained perhaps by the recent dramatic increase in immune system activation stimulated by vaccination, but on the surface that doesn’t explain the patterns we see in timing of onset of autoimmune disease or why, once someone has developed one autoimmune condition, they are at very high risk of developing another, and another, and often yet another? Why does someone with rheumatoid arthritis, for instance, in which antibodies attack the joints, often go on to develop scleroderma, where antibodies attack skin tissue? The joint-destroying antibodies don’t suddenly gain the ability to bind to skin cells. The immune system has begun producing different antibodies, which attack different tissues.
This phenomenon is usually glossed over with vague terms like “overactive immune system” or “Th1/Th2 imbalance.” While the immune system is certainly “overactive” in such cases, saying so is like saying a hypothyroid condition is caused by an underactive thyroid; it merely restates the obvious without providing insight. And many folks with autoimmunity conditions, like me, display symptoms of both Th1 and Th2 dominance. So, despite the scientific community’s fascination with the concept of Th1 and Th2 balance, I find it essentially useless. Also unexplained by “overactivity” of the immune system is why women develop autoimmune conditions at about three times the rate that men do.
Autoimmunity Close to Home
None of this is merely academic to me.

To examine that issue, the team called for prospective controlled interventional studies to determine whether vitamin D7 supplements can ameliorate symptoms and improve outcomes in connective tissue disease-related interstitial lung disease.
Source reference: Hagaman J, et al “Vitamin D deficiency and reduced lung function in connective tissue-associated interstitial lung diseases” Chest 2011; DOI: 10.1378/chest.10-0968.
New research may help explain why multiple sclerosis rates have risen sharply in the U.S. and some other countries among women, while rates appear stable in men.The study could also broaden understanding of how environmental influences alter genes to cause a wide range of diseases. The causes of multiple sclerosis (MS) are not well understood, but experts have long suspected that environmental factors trigger the disease in people who are genetically susceptible. In the newly published study, researchers found that women with MS were more likely than men with MS to have a specific genetic mutation that has been linked to the disease.
Women were also more likely to pass the mutation to their daughters than their sons and more likely to share the MS-susceptibility gene with more distant female family members. If genes alone were involved, mothers would pass the MS-related gene to their sons as often as their daughters, said researcher George C. Ebers, MD, of the University of Oxford. Ebers’ research suggests that the ability of environmental factors to alter gene expression — a relatively new field of genetic study known as epigenetics — plays a key role in multiple sclerosis and that this role is gender-specific.
The theory is that environmental influences such as diet, smoking, stress, and even exposure to sunlight can change gene expression and this altered gene expression is passed on for a generation or two. “The idea that the environment would change genes was once thought to be ridiculous,” Ebers says. “Now it is looking like this is a much bigger influence on disease than we ever imagined.”
The study by Ebers and colleagues included 1,055 families with more than one person with MS. Close to 7,100 genes were tested, including around 2,100 from patients with the disease. The researchers were looking for MS-specific alterations in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) gene region. They found that women with MS were 1.4 times more likely than men with the disease to carry the gene variant linked to disease risk.

When it comes to well-being, women and men can be as different as apples and oranges (or figs and eggplants). The differences aren’t just biological. You might be surprised to discover how many health conditions can vary hugely based on sex and gender.
Men are twice as likely to have a heart attack. That’s probably why two-thirds of heart attack research has focused on men. But assuming that heart disease is just a guy thing means that it’s been majorly under-recognized and under-researched in the ladies. In fact, women are more likely to die after a heart attack than men are.
An American Heart Association survey found that only 13 percent of women surveyed felt that heart disease was their biggest health risk. They were more concerned about breast cancer, even though women are six times more likely to be struck down by heart disease.
Take heart: Ladies, don’t dismiss potential heart attack symptoms. Women are more likely to experience throat, jaw and neck discomfort. They also often—but not always—experience usual signs like chest pain. Everyone, call 911 immediately if you suspect a heart attack, and insist on having your heart checked if you think there is a problem.
Women are diagnosed with depression about two times more than men are. Major hormonal changes in women (during pregnancy or menopause, for example) could account for some of this difference. Researchers note that depression is often under-recognized in men, perhaps because of outdated stereotypes about manly dudes being tough and untouchable.
Take care: Invest in your mental health by making time for self-care and surrounding yourself with supportive friends and family. Seek the assistance of a mental health professional if you suspect you’re depressed.
In America, women can expect to live about five years longer than men. Life expectancy for Americans born in 2018 is 81 years for women and 76 years for their male counterparts. This could be because women are more prone to mild but persistent ailments like allergies and headaches, whereas men are more prone to serious conditions like heart disease and the most deadly forms of cancer … or maybe women are just resilient AF?
Go long: Exercise is key if you want to add years to your life. In one study of more than 2,000 senior men, regular exercise was associated with a 30 percent lower risk of mortality. Walking briskly, jogging, cycling and swimming could all help you live better, longer.

"Beyond the dose, whether exposure to endotoxin (or infectious agents) is protective or harmful is likely to depend on a complex mixture of the timing of exposure during the life cycle, environmental cofactors, and genetics" 6 (p. 930).
The evidence that stimulation by infectious agents creates a protective effect against allergies suggests complex etiological mechanisms that are far from being fully elucidated.
The biological theories for explaining the findings revealed in the studies relating the increase in allergic diseases to the decline in infectious diseases are connected to advances in immunology that led to descriptions of cells CD4 T-helper (Th) the immune system's mediators. Recent studies seek to reveal how environmental changes can adversely affect these cells 17.
The immunological explanation of the hygienic hypothesis is based on the discovery and classification of T-helper (Th) lymphocytes, according to the cytokines (protean hormones that play an important role in activating the immune responses dependent on T cells) secreted by these cells. The differential activation of these cells is important in the development of immune-mediated diseases. Th1 and Th2 cells are antagonistic. Allergic diseases arise as a result of a systemic imbalance characterized by a predominance of Th2 cells, whereas infectious diseases and many auto-immune diseases are directed by T-helper cell response with a strong predominance of Th1. The explanation for this inverse relationship between allergic and infectious diseases could be that in the absence of microbial stimuli (which exhibit Th1 predominance), the immune system would alter itself in favor of Th2 responses. The entire research effort was directed towards discerning the environmental and nutritional factors that would alter the immune system's function in favor of Th1 or Th2 responses 17.
Autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, insulin-dependent diabetes, Crohn disease) are attributed to a Th1 deviation. Contrary to the theory of antagonism between Th1 and Th2 cells, recent studies attribute these diseases to the same environmental and nutritional variations related to atopic diseases 17. The prevalence of autoimmune diseases is also increasing, and this trend occurred after the same period as the tendency towards allergic diseases 1; autoimmune diseases also tend to appear more in small families with better socioeconomic conditions 17.
Arguing with the support of these statements, Simpson et al. 17 propose that environmental changes in developed countries increased the susceptibility to immune-mediated diseases in general, favoring both Th1 and Th2 responses.

HearingMen are five and a half times more likely to lose their hearing than women, according to a 2008 study from Johns Hopkins University. But, because boys and girls show no differences in ability when they’re born, experts speculate that most of these changes are due to lifestyle and environmental factors—like smoking, noise exposure, and cardiovascular risk factors—that affect more men than women.
Other research, however, has found that women of all ages have better hearing at frequencies above 2,000 Hz, but that, as they age, they are less able to hear low frequencies (1,000 to 2,000 Hz) than men.
SmellScientists have long known that women tend to outperform men on tests for identifying scents, but only recently have they found a potential biological explanation. A study published in the November 2014 issue of PLoS ONE found that post-mortem female brains had, on average, 43% more cells and almost 50% more neurons in their olfactory centers (the part dedicated to smelling and odors) than male brains.
The study’s authors can’t be sure that these extra cells are responsible for greater smelling ability, but they say it’s a good guess. From an evolutionary perspective an enhanced sense of smell may have helped women choose mates for reproductive purposes.
TasteConsidering how closely smell and taste are related, it’s not surprising that women also tend to have more sensitive palates than men. In fact, research from Yale University has found that women actually have more taste buds on their tongues. About 35% of women (and only 15% of men) can call themselves “supertasters,” which means they identify flavors such as bitter, sweet, and sour more strongly than others.
Also of note: Women of childbearing age taste flavors more intensely than younger or older females, and they may also notice increased sensitivity during pregnancy, Pelchat adds.

Men and Women Get Sick in Different Ways, Padua University Hospital Study
3/25/2013 7:45:50 AM
Recent research in laboratory medicine has revealed crucial differences between men and women with regard to cardiovascular illness, cancer, liver disease, osteoporosis, and in the area of pharmacology. At the dawn of the third millennium medical researchers still know very little about gender-specific differences in illness, particularly when it comes to disease symptoms, influencing social and psychological factors, and the ramifications of these differences for treatment and prevention. Medical research conducted over the past 40 years has focused almost exclusively on male patients.

Here are three resources that provide hope and healing for the vital topics discussed in this article:
For more information on epigenetics and the influence of environmental factors on your health check out “Epigenetics, Fibromyalgia, and You!”
For positive tips on how to deal with estrogen dominance, check out Christiane Northrup’s “7 Ways to Decrease Estrogen Dominance Including Spiritual and Holistic Options.”
For tips on building a stronger immune system, read “Is the Fibromyalgia Immune System Compromised?” – and – “Linking Fibromyalgia, the Flu Season, and the Top 3 Immune System Destroyers”
- Autoimmune Disease in Women
- Is fibromyalgia an autoimmune disorder of endogenous vasoactive neuropeptides?
- Women’s immune genes are regulated differently to men’s, study finds
- Stress Brings Out the Difference in Male, Female Brains
- His stress is not like her stress
- His stress is not like her stress
- What Are the Symptoms of Estrogen Dominance?
- Stress and hormones
- Genetic and hormonal factors in female-biased autoimmunity
Sue Ingebretson is the Natural Healing Editor for ProHealth.com as well as a frequent contributor to ProHealth’s Fibromyalgia site. She’s an Amazon best-selling author, speaker, and workshop leader. Additionally, Sue is an Integrative Nutrition & Health Coach, a Certified Nutritional Therapist, a Master NLP Practitioner, and the director of program development for the Fibromyalgia and Chronic Pain Center at California State University, Fullerton. You can find out more and contact Sue at www.RebuildingWellness.com.
Would you like to find out more about the effects of STRESS on your body? Download Sue’s free Is Stress Making You Sick? guide and discover your own Stress Profile by taking the surveys provided in this detailed 23-page report.

Seasonal allergies are a just a part of life, right? Super common, everyone has them, just a fact of life…right? What if I told you that they’re not just an annoying part of life, that they’re actually relatively new for us. And, along with auto-immune conditions, they’re on the rise and the culprit might be our super clean lives.
It might just be that clean and purified water you’re drinking, and/or the flushing toilet you have in the bathroom that has made your body more susceptible to immune imbalances like allergies and auto-immune conditions.
To find some answers we need to go back a few hundred years, back to the Industrial Revolution. Before this time, most of us lived on farms and had animals everywhere. It seems our immune system prefers this way of life…and you’ll see why in a minute.
During the Industrial Revolution, many people began to flood the cities looking for work. And life for the “average Joe” was even dirtier than in the countryside. It’s hard to live in a crowded city without running water and sanitation…just imagine what it was like back then!
But it wasn’t dirty for everyone. The elite, or the upper upper classes lived a much cleaner life. They weren’t living with the dirt and grime in the cities, nor with the animals in the countryside. They lived a bit like the way we do now…and they developed a very interesting set of symptoms.
They developed seasonal allergies.
For the first time, their immune system began to act like ours does. Mistaking pollen and dust for an invader, and causing the annoying sniffling, sneezing, runny nose symptoms that a large percentage of us feel every spring.
The part I find really funny is this—because it was the upper class that started sneezing, it became a sign of wealth. It was posh to have allergies. Today, our immune system has gotten even more confused, and with auto-immune conditions, the immune system is now mistaking our own cells as invaders and is attacking them. Could auto-immune conditions also be due to our much cleaner lifestyle?
For that we need to look at a study that followed two genetically similar groups of people. Half living in Finland, the other half in Russia, and they’re only separated by a few 100 miles and a border.

Women experience higher stress, more chronic disease, more depression, more anxiety and are more likely to be victims of violence. Women earn less than men, and in many countries they don’t have the same human rights as men.
For instance, in the U.S. in 2015 female full-time workers made only 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, indicating a 20 percent gender wage gap. Yet, life expectancy for women in the U.S. is 81.2 years compared to 76.4 for males.
Even in countries with larger wage gaps or extreme gender inequalities, women live longer than men.
As a researcher who studies cross-country and gender differences in health, I am always fascinated by how the intersection of these factors influences health. So why do women live longer, despite their lower social rank and worse health?
Is it basic biology?
Gender refers to social aspects of being a woman or a man such as social stress, opportunity and social expectations.
Sex, on the other hand, refers to biology. Biology can contribute to this difference in life expectancy. Women have biological advantages that let them live longer.
For instance, estrogen benefits women because it lowers low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (or LDL, what you may know as “bad” cholesterol) and increases high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (or HDL, the “good” cholesterol), which reduces cardiovascular risk.
Testosterone, on the other hand, increases blood levels of the bad cholesterol and decreases levels of good cholesterol. This puts men at greater risk of hypertension, heart disease and stroke.
When it comes to chronic diseases, women tend to have more of them. But there is a caveat here. Men and women have different types of chronic disease. Women have more nonfatal, chronic conditions, while men have more fatal conditions.
For example, women have more arthritis, which does not kill, even if disabling. In contrast, men are at higher risk of chronic diseases that are leading killers. Heart disease starts 10 years earlier in men than women.
So, biological differences play a role in this life expectancy gap, but gender, I argue, plays a bigger role.
Women are more health aware
Studies have shown that, in general, women are more health conscious, and they have higher awareness of their physical and mental symptoms. These all result in healthier lifestyles and better health care use. Women also communicate better about their problems, which helps the process of diagnosis.

"If a woman with osteoarthritis starts HRT and notices that her pain is getting worse, she should consider getting off the drug, taking a lower dose, or switching to another alternative to see if (it is) responsible," he says.
From arthritis to migraines, scientists are also finding sex differences in how men and women respond to the pain of common diseases and disorders:
- Arthritis: Daily logs kept by 71 arthritis patients showed that women experienced significantly more severe pain. According to Keefe, who was principal investigator on the project, women are also more likely to relax, air their emotions, seek distractions and emotional support to cope. "Men don't show their feelings and don't seek out assistance as readily as women. That may very well be what's going on in this case," Keefe says.
- Cardiac Disease: Premenopausal women have higher rates of false-positive chest pain syndromes, while postmenopausal women have relatively high rates of asymptomatic or silent heart disease, says Debra Judelson, MD, medical director of the Women's Heart Institute in Beverly Hills, Calif. and former president of the American Women's Medical Association. "Women are more likely to have high blood pressure and diabetes as complicating medical problems which can change the way they experience pain," Judelson says. "They also have more abdominal, shoulder, and neck pain, shortness of breath, back discomfort, vomiting, fatigue and nausea as opposed to chest discomfort seen in men." The bottom line: up to a 40 percent higher mortality rate in younger women under 50 with heart disease than men. "Whatever symptoms they experience are not recognized as a cardio problem in the emergency room, which contributes to delays in seeking help or getting treatment," Judelson adds.
- Migraine Headaches: Boys have more migraines than girls until puberty when hormones begin kicking in. Women are three times more likely to experience migraines than men beginning at puberty when hormone fluctuations kick in. They seem to strike whenever estrogen, the neurotransmitter serotonin, and beta endorphins are low. Several studies concluded that migraine in women of childbearing age dramatically boosts the risk of ischaemic, not haemorrhagic stroke. Women who use oral contraceptives, have high blood pressure, or smoke are at greatest risk of ischaemic stroke associated with migraine.

Why do women live longer than men?
Being the bigger and stronger of the sexes, one might assume that men would normally live longer, healthier lives than women. The opposite is true, however. In the US, for example, women outlive men by an average of 5-7 years and, according to the World Health Organization in 2006, this pattern is true for all countries on earth.
While lifestyle choices certainly play a role in the disparity, some researchers argue that genetics may also be a factor. After all, the tendency for females to outlive males applies not only to humans, but for all mammal species.
Factors that may explain why women live longer than men
Several biological theories are commonly mentioned:
- The higher level of testosterone hormone in men leads them to engage in more violent or risky behavior.
- Until menopause, the higher estrogen levels in women serves a protective function against "bad" LDL cholesterol. Thus, women generally tend to avoid the earlier signs of heart disease commonly seen in men.
- Women tend to have lower iron levels through a significant portion of their life due to menstruation -- and iron, which comes primarily from meats in our diet, plays a strong role in the formation of cell-damaging and cell-aging free-radicals.
- Because females have 2 X chromosomes (versus XY in males), defects in one chromosome may be offset by the other. (In birds, however, the chromosome variation is reversed: female birds have ZW chromosomes whereas males have the same ZZ. And, as a result, male tend to outlive females in most bird species.)
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A recent theory is that, in general, smaller individuals in a species live longer. Perhaps this is because their development involves fewer cell doublings and a reduced demand for ongoing tissue regeneration over a lifetime. Supporting this theory is the fact that age-related diseases generally appear earlier in men than in women.
This is probably where the dramatic differences between male and female longevity are determined:
- Men tend to drink and smoke more. (One US study conducted in Erie County, PA in the early 1970's indicated that, among non-smokers, there is no difference in life expectancy between men and women.)

Sex and atopy influences on the natural history of rhinitis. Curr Opin Allergy Clin Immunol. 2012;12:7–12.
Pinart M, Keller T, Reich A, Fröhlich M, Cabieses B, Hohmann C, Postma D, Bousquet J, Antó J, Keil T. Sex-related allergic rhinitis prevalence switch from childhood to adulthood: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Int Arch Allergy Immunol. 2017;172:224–35.
Becklake MR, Kauffmann F. Gender differences in airway behaviour over the human life span. Thorax. 1999;54:1119–38.
Postma DS. Gender differences in asthma development and progression. Gend Med. 2007;4 Suppl B:S133–46.
Pinart M, Benet M, Annesi-Maesano I, von Berg A, Berdel D, Carlsen KCL, Carlsen KH, Bindslev-Jensen C, Eller E, Fantini MP, et al. Comorbidity of eczema, rhinitis, and asthma in IgE-sensitised and non-IgE-sensitised children in MeDALL: A population-based cohort study. Lancet Respir Med. 2014;2:131–40.
Moher D, Liberati A, Tetzlaff J, Altman DG. Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement. Int J Surg. 2010;8:336–41.
Brito Rde C, da Silva GA, Motta ME, Brito MC. The association of rhinoconjunctivitis and asthma symptoms in adolescents. Rev Port Pneumol. 2009;15:613–28.
Desalu OO, Salami AK, Iseh KR, Oluboyo PO. Prevalence of self reported allergic rhinitis and its relationship with asthma among adult Nigerians. J Investig Allergol Clin Immunol. 2009;19:474–80.
Hong S, Son DK, Lim WR, Kim SH, Kim H, Yum HY, Kwon H. The prevalence of atopic dermatitis, asthma, and allergic rhinitis and the comorbidity of allergic diseases in children.

Increasing prevalence in allergic diseases has been observed in many countries, especially in Western but also many developing countries . Sex specific differences in prevalence of allergic rhinitis and asthma over the life span were recognized, showing a higher prevalence of allergic rhinitis and asthma as single entities in boys than in girls during childhood followed by an equal distribution in adolescence [2, 3]. In adulthood more women than men are affected by asthma [4, 5]. In a prospective cohort study, the prevalence of coexisting eczema, allergic rhinitis, and asthma in the same child was more common than expected by chance alone and was not only attributable to IgE sensitization, suggesting that these diseases share causal mechanisms . In a systematic review of studies across the globe we showed a sex-switch in prevalence of allergic rhinitis in population-based studies . Since research on multimorbidity, i.e. the coexistence of 2 or more allergic diseases in the same individual, is sparse, the aim of this systematic review with meta-analyses was to examine sex specific differences in the prevalence of coexisting allergic rhinitis and asthma, from childhood through adolescence into adulthood.
Data sources, search strategy, and selection criteria
We conducted a systematic literature search using the online databases MEDLINE and EMBASE. MeSH terms were used in conjunction with keywords searched in the title and abstract. We restricted our search to studies published between January 2000 and April 2014. There was no restriction to the language of publication. The protocol for our systematic review was developed with guidance from the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) statement . It can be accessed at PROSPERO (http://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/, registration number CRD42016036105). To manage the identified publications, we used EndNote X7® (Thomson Reuters) bibliographic database.
Inclusion and exclusion criteria
The selection of studies was performed along with pre-set criteria for in- or exclusion. Since the present study is a post hoc analysis of a larger review considering the difference in prevalence for allergic rhinitis only , we chose broad inclusion criteria to reach most of the available information and to increase generalisability.

Due to the presence of this variation in both groups, we could not statistically associate this observed structural variation directly with the SLE phenotype. However, given the complex genetic nature of this autoimmune disease and given that TLR7 has potential functional relevance to SLE (6), we cannot rule out the possibility that copy number variations in TLR7 may influence the genetic background susceptibility for SLE. Since additional genetic variants are associated with lupus-like disease in mice, along with a TLR7 gene copy number variation (1), such a variant in the presence of other genetic 3378 KELLEY ET AL factors may have a contributive, additive effect on the human SLE phenotype in a subset of patients. Another recent study has emphasized sex differences in TLR7 function that might influence the SLE phenotype. Peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBLs) from healthy women release more IFN␣ after TLR-7 stimulation as compared with PBLs from healthy men, an effect that was not seen after stimulation with TLR-9, another inducer of IFN␣ (14). The increase in IFN␣ among PBLs from women was not due to a defect in X chromosome inactivation (14). Our results validate the findings of that study, since a significant difference in the relative TLR7 gene copy number in genomic DNA normalized against GAPDH was observed between men and women (P ⫽ 0.0138). While TLR7 may influence the genetic background of SLE pathogenesis and contribute to the difference in disease prevalence between the sexes, such a contribution in humans cannot be directly attributed to an increase in gene copy number in a standardized quantity of genomic DNA as was seen in the Yaa mouse. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank Jan Dumanski for critical review of the manuscript, Amy Peterson for technical assistance, and S. Louis Bridges for use of the ABI 7900HT sequencer. AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS Dr. Kelley had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. Study design. Kelley, Johnson, Kimberly, Edberg. Acquisition of data. Kelley, Alarcón. Analysis and interpretation of data. Kelley, Johnson, Alarcón, Kimberly, Edberg. Manuscript preparation. Kelley, Edberg.

(They’re often six minutes short of a full day.) Men are more likely to be night owls. But women function better during periods of sleep deprivation.
- During exercise, women’s primary fuel is fat. For men, it’s carbohydrates.
- An average adult female has about 15–70 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL) of testosterone. An average adult male has about 270–1070 ng/dL. Every year after age 30, men’s testosterone levels drop about one percent. That doesn’t happen for women. But women do see their estrogen levels fall off after menopause.
- Men have pronounced Adam’s apples. That’s because they have larger voice boxes that make the surrounding cartilage stick out more.
- Both sexes hit peak bone mass around age 30. At 40, men and women start losing bone. Menopause accelerates bone loss in women. So, women 51-70 need 200 milligrams (mg) of calcium more than men the same age. That’s 1200 mg per day for women and 1000 mg per day for men.
- The daily calorie requirement for men is higher than women. There are a few reasons for this: higher muscle mass, stature, and basal metabolic rate. Pound for pound, muscles burn more than double the calories fat does.
- Men and women carry different amounts of body fat. The higher body fat in women—about 10 percent—mostly supports reproductive physiology. One example is when a woman’s body fat gets too low, she stops menstruating.
- Women typically carry their body fat in their hips and thighs. Fat tends to deposit around men’s stomachs.
- The difference between men and women’s size, muscle mass, and calorie needs means men typically require diets higher in protein.
- One study found that men have lower resting heart rates than women. But women have lower peak heart rates. Men’s heart rates typically rise faster during exercise and slow quicker afterward.
- Men normally have more red blood cells (4.7–6.1 million cells per microliter compared to 4.2–5.4 million cells per microliter for women).
- Women typically have lower blood pressure than men—regardless of race or ethnicity.
- For most of life, men and women have the same vitamin D requirements.

It is clear that one of the main differences between the sexes is down to hormones. In women hormone imbalance has serious consequences for increased risk for hormonal cancers, strokes and heart disease.
In men oestrogen dominance can also be a factor, leading to increased risk for cancer of the prostate and osteoporosis.
As men are less likely to look for information on their health, you might want to share the following articles with the men in your life.

In the meta-analysis for the prevalence of asthma only, considerable heterogeneity was found (I 0–10 2 = 75%; I 11–17 2 = 81%) resulting in an overall of I2 = 85%. Little or no heterogeneity was seen in studies reporting results for allergic rhinitis only in children and adolescents (I 0–10 2 = 27%; I 11–17 2 = 0%) compared to studies including adults (I 18–79 2 = 73%). All studies were of moderate quality (4 points) except from Desalu et al., which was rated as high quality (5 points), see Additional file 1: Table E4.
We found a clear ‘sex-switch’ in the prevalence of coexisting allergic rhinitis and asthma from a male predominance in childhood to a female predominance in adolescence. Similar trends of these sex-specific prevalence patterns were observed in participants with asthma only and those with allergic rhinitis only. Two studies in adults showed similar prevalence rates in both sexes.
Comparison with other studies
In a global systematic review with meta-analysis we showed sex-related differences in rhinitis prevalence with a prevalence shift from a male predominance at around puberty to a female predominance thereafter . Similarly, a retrospective analysis of the ECRHS data from 16 European countries showed a transition for asthma from a male predominance in childhood (0–10 years) followed by an equal gender distribution in adolescence (10–15 years) leading to a female predominance in adults (> 15 years) . Sex-specific rhinitis and comorbid asthma prevalence data for older men and women are very scarce. Interestingly, according to a large observational all-female cohort, the Nurses’ Health Study in USA, the age-adjusted risk of asthma seems to be increased in postmenopausal women who ever or currently used hormone replacement therapy (i.e. conjugated estrogens with or without progesterone) compared to those who never used such hormones. However, allergic rhinitis with and without comorbid asthma has not been examinated . In a cohort study of 509 children with allergic rhinitis from Turkey (mean age 7.2 ± 3.5 years, age range 1.5–18 years) Dogru showed that asthma was prevalent in the majority (53.2%) of these children .

Research conducted by the University of Valencia (UV) and the Jaume I University of Castellón (UJI), among other institutions, has found alterations to the structure of the brain's nonapeptidergic systems, social behavior and the production of pheromones, traits that reveal sexual dimorphism, in male mice with a lack of the Mecp2 gene.
A new study published on the preprint server medRxiv in August 2020 shows that the risk of infection is high for pre-menopausal women but the risk of death is much higher for men in the same age group and throws light on the protective nature of estradiol therapy in post-menopausal women.
Results from an international clinical trial found that men with advanced prostate cancer who have mutated BRCA1/BRCA2 genes can be treated successfully with a targeted therapy known as rucaparib, resulting in recent FDA approval.
Running is one of the most popular forms of exercise, enjoyed by a broad range of age groups and skill levels. More women are running recreationally compared to men; specifically 54% of runners are female as indicated by a 2018 National Runner Survey.
New insight on differences in the brains of men and women with autism has been published today in the open-access journal eLife.
Almost from the beginning, scientists have been struck by the disproportionately higher numbers of men and older adults who have developed severe COVID-19 disease compared to younger individuals and women. Prior research has shown that in 37 of the 38 countries from which sex-stratified data was available, males were at a higher risk of death. Also, post-menopausal women are at increased risk of severe COVID-19. However, the biological underpinnings of this have been less visible.
News-Medical speaks to Dr. Robert M. Sargis about his research into whether medication is exposing us to hormone-disrupting chemicals.
In this interview, Dr. Andrea Dunaif talks to News-Medical about their genetic analysis study which suggests there are different subtypes of PCOS.
In a new trial, Swedish researchers will investigate if a medicine normally used to treat prostate cancer can also be used to treat COVID-19 in patients.
Men who follow plant-based diets have testosterone levels that are basically the same as the levels in men who eat meat, a study shows.

Apparently this is all a bit of a mystery. Those in the know think it’s triggered by a combination of genetic, environmental and, possibly, hormonal factors.This means that some people are born with specific genes that make them more vulnerable to a dodgy immune system. So everything could be ticking along just fine for years and then a common virus triggers the immune system and stops it working properly.
The female hormone oestrogen can also cause issues, which is why Sjögren’s Syndrome’s symptoms can often rear their ugly head around the start of the menopause, when oestrogen levels begin to fall. As if women didn’t have enough to deal with at this point.

- Our hearts beat faster,
even during sleep.
- Our core body temperature
blood carries higher levels of protective immunoglobulin and lower amounts
of oxygen rich hemoglobin.
- We are twice as sensitive
to sound, but only half as sensitive to light as men are.
- Our vocal cords are
shorter, our larynx 30 percent smaller.
- The mix of chemicals in
female saliva is different —and changes throughout the menstrual cycle.
Okay, but so what? Hales clears this up: "What difference do such differences
make? By most measures of performance, very little. The abilities of the sexes,
physical and mental overlap, and the variability within each sex can be greater
than between them."
differences make very little difference, other than general interest and some
health issues, then why is she writing this book?
contribute, Hales says, is an understanding about why diet pills and other drugs
that have been tested only in men can trigger serious effects in women.
We then go on to
examine women’s biological reality that has always shaped the lives of women:
we change, most noticeably in the rhythms and cycles of menstruation—something
that has no counterpart in the male. "Try as we may, we cannot
completely ignore the blood on the tampon, the inexplicable hunger for a baby,
the unsettling aftershocks of birth, the temperature spikes of menopause…. Our
female rhythms no longer constrict the steps we can take and the moves we can
make, but they remain the chemical choreography of our lives."
Who are all these
women who try to ignore their menstrual cycle? Hasn’t this been done to death?
When are we going to get beyond the crotch?
Hales says that
until recently this was used against us, but now it isn’t. We’re not sure
why except for that whole evolution thing and a brief reference to the women’s
movement. We don’t really know why the menstrual cycle mades us hated and
ashamed (as Hales says, "stigmatized," used to discriminate against us) in
one society, but capable and proud in another.
Hales moves on to
the brain. "A woman’s brain itself seems a model of connectedness. Women
typically use more cells in more parts of their brain than men do.

Between 1997 and 2000, eight of the ten drugs withdrawn from the market had more detrimental side effects in women than men.
In 2012, researchers discovered that women metabolize zolpidem, the active ingredient in Ambien and other sleep medications, more slowly than men. This meant that for 20 years, women, on the advice of their doctors, had been overdosing on a drug known to significantly impair driving . The drug took a particularly noticeable toll in 2010, when women experienced more than two-thirds of all 64,000 zolpidem-related emergencies. In January of 2013, the FDA warned that the recommended dose for women should be cut in half, a change now specified in the drug directions.
“To my knowledge, that’s the first sex-specific dosage labeling for a drug,” says Dr. Janine Clayton, director of the National Institute of Health’s Office of Research on Women’s Health. “We need to do better.”
Clayton first became aware of these inequities in 2001 when she discovered yet another shocking statistic : worldwide, nearly twice as many women suffer from visual impairment and blindness as their male counterparts. This left Clayton, an ophthalmologist at the time, reeling. “Surely this can’t be the case in the U.S.,” she had said to herself. But, she found out, it was.
Clayton was determined to find the cause for these stark differences. One explanation, she suspects, is rooted in a centuries-old bias.
Underrepresented in Research
Across biological and medical research, scientists more often study males than females. Historically, the male-dominated scientific community claimed that female hormonal fluctuations introduced complicating variables to their experiments. Others thought it a moral imperative to protect women, especially pregnant ones, from the risks of research.
Regardless of their motivations, scientists systematically sidestepped sex differences by studying men and then applying the findings to women. Today, we’re discovering that this has left yawning gaps in our biomedical knowledge.
This is not to say that male and female biomedicine are always different. Analyses of 163 FDA approved drugs between 1995 and 2005 uncovered only 11 with largely differing effects on those with two X chromosomes. And some drugs originally thought to act differently in the sexes have been found indistinguishable upon further investigation.

The topic of food allergies and intolerance has gained a worldwide attention in the recent years, because their prevalence has been on the rise. As medicine advances, so does our understanding of the immune system and the effects certain food substances have on the body. Many menopausal women use the terms food intolerance and allergy interchangeably, but the truth is they differ a great deal. Let's take a look at food intolerance and allergies to better understand them and see how they are linked.
Food intolerance or sensitivity happens when the digestive system does not break down certain foods properly. There can be various underlying causes of food intolerance, such as an absence of an enzyme to digest some foods. Examples of that include lactose intolerance and conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), or gluten-intolerance in celiac disease.
Foods causing intolerance:
- Dairy products
- Eggs whites
- Citrus fruit
- Red wine
Symptoms of food intolerance:
- Breathing problems
- Stomach upset
Identifying the food that your body does not tolerate well might be tricky. Women are usually advised to make a diary of the food they eat throughout the day, so if they start feeling sick, they can immediately relate it something they just ate. Once identified, that food is best to be omitted, though typically eating small amounts of it can be tolerated without problems.
Food allergy happens when there is an overreaction of the immune system to a protein found in certain foods or beverages. The body treats it as a toxic and harmful substance and initiates a complex cascade of reactions to get rid of it.
- Fish and shellfish
- Tree nuts
Symptoms of food allergies:
- Dizziness and loss of consciousness
- Difficulty breathing and talking
- Swelling of the mouth and face
- Sore eyes and throat
- Itchy skin
Having a food allergy can be life-threatening, because it may lead to anaphylaxis, which is a severe whole-body allergic reaction an allergen. Often patients with diagnosed food allergy have to carry an epinephrine shot at all times and self-administer it in case of a severe allergic reaction to prevent anaphylactic shock, which can be fatal if untreated.
The occurrence of food intolerance and food allergy has been increasing around the world in the recent years.

After these antibodies become activated through an interactive process with an unknown organism, they are mass-produced by immune cells and circulate our body in order to form an immunological ‘belt’. Vaccinations work on the same principle, as weakened components of microbes which cause a certain disease to allow the body to make itself ready for launching a big immune response when the problem-causing microbe is faced in the future.
When it comes to our immune system and its defensive role, we can distinguish two types of reactions – if it attacks our body, it is an autoimmune disorder, and if it attacks a harmless protein coming from our environment, it is an allergy.
It all starts in the early stages of life, as a normal course of childhood development when early exposure to parasites and bacteria allow the immune system to develop regulatory mechanisms and keep everything under control. However, in environments lacking exposure to these organisms, this ‘adjustment’ fails to occur and children prone to allergies begin to develop an inflammatory response against normally harmless proteins from their environment.
Allergies risk factors
Moreover, there are some so-called risk factors which make you prone to developing an allergy:
- – If allergies or asthma run in your family for generations, e.g. if one parent is allergic, a child has a 30-50% chance of inheriting the allergy, yet not necessarily the parent’s type. But if both parents are allergic, the children have a 60-80% likelihood of inheriting allergies.
- – It is proven that the period of childhood is the most likely to develop an allergy.
- – If you already have asthma, there is a high chance of suffering from an allergy.
- – The environment also plays an important role in this process as it either protects you from developing an allergy or adapts you to it. Some exposures provoke certain allergies in individuals and their children (such as high consumption of junk food and cigarette smoke), but others, on the other hand, are protective (for example exposure to farm animals and high-fiber diets).
- – Children who suffer from viral or bacterial infections of the upper respiratory system (throat, nose and bronchial tubes) during the first 6 months of their life have higher chances of developing allergies or asthma later in life.
What is the hygiene hypothesis?
Over time experts in the field have developed the hygiene hypothesis for autoimmune and allergic diseases.