June 20, 2006
The Weaker Sex
Marianne J. Legato studies gender-specific medicine. She thinks that perhaps men deserve a little more attention.
Over the past two decades, we've radically revised how we conduct medical research and take care of our female patients. And we've made valuable discoveries about how gender helps determine vulnerability to illness and, ultimately, the timing and causes of death. But I now believe that we doctors and researchers may have focused too much on women.
Here are the highlights:
Even though there are more male than female embryos, there are more miscarriages of male fetuses.
Males are three to four times more likely than girls to have developmental disorders like autism and dyslexia; girls learn language earlier, develop richer vocabularies and even hear better than boys.
Girls demonstrate insight and judgment earlier in adolescence than boys, who are more impulsive and take more risks than their sisters.
Teenage boys are more likely to commit suicide than girls and are more likely to die violent deaths before adulthood.
Men die earlier than women.
Twice as many men as women die of coronary artery disease
Of the 10 most common infections, men are more likely to have serious encounters with seven of them.
The author calls for more research on men's health:
It's time to focus on the unique problems of men just the way we have learned to do with women. In 2004, the National Institutes of Health spent twice as much on studies done only on women as only on men. We are not devoting nearly enough money to men's health; worse yet, we may be spending those insufficient funds to answer exactly the wrong questions.