Although medicine delivers mass-production drugs for common diseases, most of us express the ‘same’ disease in different ways. Not only that, men and women have different symptoms from each other, researchers have discovered this week.
Common diseases such as heart disease, cancer, liver diseases and osteoporosis are not the same for men and women; symptoms and disease progression are different, say researchers from the Padua University Hospital.
Their discoveries present a new challenge for the pharmaceutical industry: producing drugs that are gender specific.
Typical symptoms of heart disease are a constricted chest and pain that passes down the left arm-but that’s only true for men. Women experience heart problems as nausea and lower abdominal pain. Similarly, colon cancer develops later in women, and the tumours have a different location in the female body, say the researchers.
(Source: Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine, 2013; 1. doi: 10.1515/cclm-2012-0849).
What do you think? Start a conversation over on the... WDDTY Community
