Tag: gender

Categories : Ageing Skeletal SystemTags :

Prunes Also Protect Bone Health in Men

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New research published in the Journal of Food and Medicine reports that daily prunes consumption protects bone health in men over 50. This study is the first of its kind to examine the beneficial prune effect on bones in men. 

Some 2 million men are estimated to be battling osteoporosis and another 16.1 million men have osteopenia, or low bone mass. Despite these numbers, bone disease in men is often overlooked.

“We’ve already seen significant evidence that prunes have a positive effect on bone health in women, so it’s particularly exciting to find that prunes can also play a beneficial role in men’s bone health. We look forward to continuing to study the ‘prune effect’ on bone and other health outcomes in men,” said lead researcher Professor Shirin Hooshmand at San Diego State University.

In this study, 57 healthy men aged 50-79 years old were randomised to either consume 100 grams of prunes every day or no prunes for twelve months. After a year, the prune consumers showed significant decreases in biomarkers of bone breakdown, while no changes were observed in the control group. The study authors also reported the men who ate prunes showed improvements in bone geometry indicating greater bone strength.

Historically, research has focused on osteoporosis and bone health in women, already indicating a favorable bone response to prunes specifically among postmenopausal women. Several studies have suggested that eating 50 to 100 grams of prunes everyday could lead to increased bone mass and decreased bone breakdown. Moreover, a recent case study earlier this year reported that total bone mineral density increased in a postmenopausal woman with osteopenia after she consumed 50 grams of prunes daily for 16 months.

“Bone health is not just a concern for women. Men need to think about how to protect their bones as well,” said Leslie Bonci, MPH, RDN and consultant with the California Prune Board. “Prunes are a shelf-stable and nutrient-packed food that provide a preventive, proactive, palatable option for men to optimize their bone health.”

While San Diego State University’s newest research is an exciting addition to existing prune-focused literature, more work on the effect of prunes on human bone health is currently underway. An upcoming study from Pennsylvania State University examines how consuming different amounts of prunes affects health outcomes in postmenopausal women over a one-year period. The study not only explores the impact of prunes on bone health, but it will also look at the prune-effect on inflammation and gut health.

Source: PR Newswire

Categories : Ageing GenderTags :

Older Women Struggle More with Daily Activities

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Older women are more likely to struggle with both regular daily tasks and mobility activities, according to new analysis of longitudinal cohort studies.

However, the researchers say disparities in ability to perform daily tasks have been steadily decreasing as the socioeconomic gap between the sexes has decreased.  

The international study, published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity, uses data from more than 27 000 men and 34 000 women aged 50 to 100, born between 1895 and 1960, to examine sex differences in daily activity and mobility limitations. Researchers at UCL and the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in France drew on four large longitudinal studies, covering 14 countries*.

Women were more found to be more likely than men to be limited in their ‘functional capacity’ (both tasks and mobility) as they get older. From age 75, women were also more likely to have three or more mobility issues (such as going up a flight of stairs) or limitations with more complex daily tasks (eg managing money) compared to men who were more likely to have just one or two. At age 85 years, the prevalence of three or more mobility limitations was 10% higher in women than in men.

Lead author, Mikaela Bloomberg, UCL PhD candidate, explained: “Our study of over 60,000 participants born between 1895 and 1960 provides new insights on functional limitations and sex differences.

“We found that women are more likely to be limited than men in carrying out daily tasks from age 70, while we observed women were more likely to be limited in mobility activities from age 50 onward.

“This is an important observation because mobility limitations can precede other more severe limitations and targeting these gaps at middle age could be one way to reduce sex differences in limitations at older ages.”

Historical socioeconomic differences between men and women in areas such as education and entrance to the labour force may partly explain these differences, as women are disproportionately exposed to associated health risks that can lead to disability.

“It appears that gender inequalities in the ability to carry out daily tasks at older age are decreasing over time and this could be explained by the fact that women have better access to education and are more likely to enter the paid labour force in recent generations,” said Bloomberg.

“And although reductions in socioeconomic inequalities may be associated with smaller disparities in simple daily tasks, we did not see the same reductions in sex disparities for mobility after accounting for socioeconomic factors. This might be partly due to sex differences in body composition such as body mass and skeletal muscle index but more research is needed to identify other factors.”

Co-author Dr Séverine Sabia added: “Developing targeted prevention policies to preserve independent living and quality of life for older adults requires an understanding of drivers of sex differences in functional limitations.

“Our study indicates improvements in socioeconomic conditions for women could play an important role in reducing these sex differences. Findings also highlight the importance of early prevention to tackle sex differences in mobility that may trigger sex differences in disability at older age.”

Source: University College London

Categories : Gender PaediatricsTags :

Is That A Girl’s Voice or A Boy’s?

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Researchers have found that it is possible to distinguish a girl’s voice from a boy’s from as young as five years old, but identification requires the listener to perceive the size of the speaker, providing a clue to their likely age. 

Perceiving gender in children’s voices is of special interest to researchers, because in children, a girl’s voice and a boy’s are very similar before the age of puberty. Adult male and female voices are fairly easy to distinguish due to acoustic differences.

With children, gender perception is much more complicated because gender differences in speech may emerge before sex-related anatomical differences between speakers. This suggests listeners may need to consider speaker age when guessing speaker gender and the perception of gender may depend on acoustic information besides anatomical differences between boys and girls.

In the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, researchers reported developing a database of speech samples from children ages five to 18 to answer two questions: What types of changes occur in children’s voices as they become adults, and how do listeners adjust to the enormous variability in acoustic patterns across speakers?

Listeners assess a speaker’s gender, age, height, and other physical characteristics based primarily on the speaker’s voice pitch and on the resonance (formant frequencies) of their voice.

“Resonance is related to speaker height — think violin versus cello — and is a reliable indicator of overall body size,” said co-author Santiago Barreda, from the University of California, Davis. “Apart from these basic cues, there are other more subtle cues related to behaviour and the way a person ‘chooses’ to speak, rather than strictly depending on the speaker’s anatomy.”
When co-authors Barreda and Peter Assmann presented listeners with both syllables and sentences from different speakers, gender identification improved for sentences. They said this supports the stylistic elements of speech that highlight gender differences and are better conveyed in sentences.

They made two other important findings. First, listeners can reliably identify the gender of individual children as young as five.

“This is well before there are any anatomical differences between speakers and before there are any reliable differences in pitch or resonance,” said Barreda. “Based on this, we conclude that when the gender of individual children can be readily identified, it is because of differences in their behavior, in their manner of speaking, rather than because of their anatomy.”

Second, they found identification of gender of speakers must take place along with the identification of age and likely physical size.

“Essentially, there is too much uncertainty in the speech signal to treat age, gender, and size as independent decisions,” he said. “One way to resolve this is to consider, for example, what do 11-year-old boys sound like, rather than what do males sound like and what do 11-year-olds sound like, as if these were independent questions.”

Their findings suggest that “perception of gender can depend on subtle cues based on behaviour and not anatomy,” said Barreda. “In other words, gender information in speech can be largely based on performance rather than on physical differences between male and female speakers. If gendered speech followed necessarily from speaker anatomy, there would be no basis to reliably identify the gender of little girls and boys.”

This study supports the notion that gender (as opposed to sex) is largely performative in nature, which has long been argued on theoretical grounds.

Source: American Institute of Physics

Categories : Gender Metabolic DisordersTags :

Gaps and Gender Differences in Diabetes Management

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A new study from the University of Eastern Finland revealed there are gaps and gender differences in diabetes management. Type 2 diabetes is often accompanied by elevated cholesterol levels, but many patients do not receive appropriate cholesterol-lowering treatment, according to the study, which appears in Scientific Reports.

Type 2 diabetes is a major risk factor of cardiovascular diseases, such as coronary artery disease and heart failure, as well as premature death. To prevent or at least delay complications, regular health care visits and good control of blood glucose, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and other risk factors are needed.

The present study shows that LDL-C control and statin prescriptions remain suboptimal in clinical practice – despite guidelines that consistently recommend treating elevated LDL-C with statins at moderate- to high-intensity. The study drew on electronic health records of 8592 type 2 diabetes patients between 2012 and 2017.

Analysing LDL-C values over time, researchers identified four groups with different trajectories. Most patients (86%) had relatively stable LDL-C values at moderate levels and only a few patients showed a significant increase (3%) or decrease (4%) during the follow-up. However, the second-largest group (8%) consisted of patients with alarmingly “high-stable” LDL-C levels at around 3.9 mmol/L.  

The “high-stable” LDL-C group had the lowest proportions of patients on moderate- and high-intensity treatment as well as any statin treatment. The proportion of patients receiving any statin treatment even decreased from 42% to 27% among men, and from 34% to 23% among women between 2012 and 2017.

“We observed significant gender differences in care processes and outcomes,” said Laura Inglin, Early Stage Researcher, University of Eastern Finland. “In all the trajectory groups, women had significantly higher average LDL-C levels and received any statin treatment and high-intensity treatment less frequently than men.”

Significant differences were seen in terms of longitudinal care processes, outcomes, and treatments, pointing out gaps in current diabetes management. Efforts to control LDL-C should be increased – especially in patients with continuously elevated levels – by initiating and intensifying statin treatment earlier and re-initiating the treatment after discontinuation if possible.

Source: University of Eastern Finland

Categories : Gender Medical Research & TechnologyTags :

Biological Research Often Incorrectly Reports Sex Differences

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An analysis of published studies from a range of biological specialties shows that when data are reported by sex, critical statistical analyses are often missing and the findings are likely to be reported in misleading ways.

The analysis was published in the journal eLife.

“We found that when researchers report that males and females respond differently to a manipulation such as a drug treatment, 70% of the time the researchers have not actually compared those responses statistically at all,” said senior author Donna Maney, a professor of neuroscience in Emory’s Department of Psychology. “In other words, an alarming percentage of claims of sex differences are not backed by sufficient evidence.”

In the articles lacking the proper evidence, she added, sex-specific effects were claimed almost 90% of the time. In contrast, authors that tested statistically for sex-specific effects only reported them 63% of the time.

”Our results suggest that researchers are predisposed to finding sex differences and that sex-specific effects are likely over-reported in the literature,” Prof Maney said.

The problem is so pervasive not even her own work was safe. “Once I realised how prevalent it is, I went back and checked my own published articles and there it was,” she said. “I myself have claimed a sex difference without comparing males and females statistically.”

Prof Maney stressed that the problem should not be discounted; it is becoming increasingly serious, she said, because of mounting pressure from funding agencies and journals to study both sexes, and interest from the medical community to develop sex-specific treatments.

Better training and oversight are needed to ensure scientific rigor in research on sex differences, the authors wrote: “We call upon funding agencies, journal editors and our colleagues to raise the bar when it comes to testing for and reporting sex differences.”

Historically, biomedical research has often included just one sex, usually biased toward males. In recent decades, laws have been passed requiring US medical research to include females in clinical trials and report the sex of human participants or animal subjects.

“If you’re trying to model anything relevant to a general population, you should include both sexes,” Prof Maney explained. “There are a lot of ways that animals can vary, and sex is one of them. Leaving out half of the population makes a study less rigorous.”

As more studies consider sex-based differences, Maney adds, it is important to ensure that the methods underlying their analyses are sound.

For the analysis, Prof Maney and co-author Yesenia Garcia-Sifuentes, PhD candidate, looked at 147 studies published in 2019 to see what is used for evidence of sex differences. The studies ranged across nine different biological disciplines, including field studies on giraffes and immune responses in humans.

The studies that were analysed all included both males and females and separated the data by sex. Garcia-Sifuentes and Prof Maney found that the sexes were compared, either statistically or by assertion, in 80% of the articles. Of those articles, sex differences were reported in 70% of them and of those treated as a major finding in about half.

Statistical errors were seen in some studies, with a significant difference for one sex but not the other counted as a difference between them.  The problem with that approach is that the statistical tests conducted on each sex can’t give “yes” or “no” answers about whether the treatment had an effect.

“Comparing the outcome of two independent tests is like comparing a ‘maybe so’ with an ‘I don’t know’ or ‘too soon to tell,'” Maney explains. “You’re just guessing. To show actual evidence that the response to treatment differed between females and males, you need to show statistically that the effect of treatment depended on sex. That is, to claim a ‘sex-specific’ effect, you must demonstrate that the effect in one sex was statistically different from the effect in the other.”

Conversely, their analysis also encountered strategies that could mask sex differences, such as pooling data from males and females without testing for a difference.

“At this moment in history, the stakes are high,” Maney says. “Misreported findings may affect health care decisions in dangerous ways. Particularly in cases where sex-based differences may be used to determine what treatment someone gets for a particular condition, we need to proceed cautiously. We need to hold ourselves to a very high standard when it comes to scientific rigor.”

Source: EurekAlert!

Categories : Gender Mental HealthTags :

Menstrual Cycles May Impact PTSD Symptoms in Women

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New research has found that post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in women may vary over the course of the menstrual cycle, with more symptoms during the cycle’s first few days when the hormone oestradiol is low and fewer symptoms close to ovulation, when oestradiol is high.

The results could have implications for PTSD diagnosis and treatment, said lead author Jenna Rieder, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. “When in the cycle you assess women might actually affect whether they meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD, especially for people who are right on the border. And that can have real practical implications, say, for someone who is a veteran and entitled to benefits or for health insurance purposes.”

The research was published in the journal Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy.

Oestradiol is a form of oestrogen that regulates the menstrual cycle. During the follicular phase, rising oestradiol levels trigger a cascade of events that result in ovulation. Studies have linked low-oestradiol portions of the cycle to greater activation in the limbic areas of the brain, which are related to emotion, and to lower activation in the prefrontal cortex when viewing emotional content. Low oestradiol has also been linked to greater stress and anxiety as well as increased fear responses.

To find out whether those links were related to traua response, researchers studied 40 women, aged 18 to 33, all of whom had experienced or witnessed a traumatic event, such as a serious injury or sexual violence. In the lab, researchers measured the participants’ level of oestradiol in their saliva, then asked them to describe the trauma that had happened to them and the PTSD symptoms they’d experienced in the past month. They found that lower oestradiol was associated with greater self-reported symptom severity in the participants.

The researchers also measured two stress biomarkers in participants’ saliva, the hormone cortisol and the enzyme salivary alpha-amylase, before and after the participants described their trauma. Salivary alpha-amylase is related to the “fight-or-flight” stress response, and cortisol is related to the body’s slower, more sustained stress response.

“In a healthy system we want a moderate, coordinated response of both of these biomarkers,” Prof Rieder said. In the women in the low-oestradiol portions of their menstrual cycles, the researchers instead found low cortisol and high salivary alpha-amylase levels resulting from recounting their trauma stories – a pattern that’s been linked in previous studies with maladaptive stress responses.

The researchers then asked the participants to answer five daily questionnaires for 10 days spanning the high- and low-oestradiol portions of their menstrual cycles. The questionnaires measured how participants were feeling at each time (from “extremely unpleasant” to “extremely pleasant” and “extremely nonstimulated or activated” to “extremely stimulated or activated”). Participants also completed a PTSD symptom checklist each evening.

Participants were found to have greater variability in their daily moods during the low-oestradiol days of their cycle and reported more severe PTSD symptoms on those days.

This could have implications for diagnosis and treatment of PTSD in women, who have long been underrepresented in PTSD research. “PTSD for a long time was mostly studied in men, in part because it was mainly studied in veterans, who were mostly men,” Prof Rieder said.

As well as its relevance to diagnosis, knowing how the menstrual cycle affects PTSD symptoms could be useful for both clinicians and patients, according to Prof Rieder. “I think this is something that clinicians would want to know, so they can impart this knowledge as part of psychoeducation,” she said. “For women who are naturally cycling, it may be useful to understand how the menstrual cycle affects their symptoms. When you can explain what’s happening biologically, it often becomes less threatening.”

Source: American Psychological Association

Categories : Gender General InterestTags :

Men and Women Have the Same Emotional Turbulence

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Contrary to widely held gender stereotypes, women are not more emotional than men, say researchers of a new study into emotional differences in gender.

Feelings such as enthusiasm, nervousness or strength are often interpreted differently between the two genders. It’s what being ’emotional’ means to men versus women that is part of a new University of Michigan study that dispels these biases.

For example, a man whose emotions fluctuate in a sporting event is described as “passionate” while a woman whose emotions change in any event, even if provoked, is considered “irrational,” said senior author Adriene Beltz, assistant professor of psychology.

Prof Beltz and colleagues followed 142 men and women over 75 days to learn more about their daily emotions, both positive and negative. The women were divided into four groups: one naturally cycling and three others who used different forms of oral contraceptives.

The researchers detected fluctuations in emotions three different ways, and then compared the sexes. Little to no differences were seen between the men and the various groups of women, suggesting that men’s emotions fluctuate to the same extent as women’s, although likely for different reasons.

“We also didn’t find meaningful differences between the groups of women, making clear that emotional highs and lows are due to many influences – not only hormones,” Prof Beltz said.

These findings could have implications for research, which has historically excluded women partly because ovarian hormone fluctuations result in variation, especially in emotion, which cannot be experimentally controlled, the researchers said.

“Our study uniquely provides psychological data to show that the justifications for excluding women in the first place (because fluctuating ovarian hormones, and consequently emotions, confounded experiments) were misguided,” Prof Beltz said.

Source: University of Michigan

Categories : Gender Substance UseTags :

Studies Find Females More Susceptible To Addiction

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Several new studies focusing on sex differences in pain and addiction suggest that females could be more susceptible to drug addiction and addiction-like behaviours than males. Researchers also investigated how sleep deprivation affected the likelihood of relapse, partly driven by hormone differences in females and males. The studies will be presented at the American Physiological Society’s seventh conference on New Trends in Sex and Gender Medicine from 19 to 22 October.

This study used a rat model to investigate the connection between opioid abstinence and persistent sleep loss and its impact on the body’s central stress response system. Researchers specifically found persistent sleep disruption may cause or perpetuate abnormalities in their hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis. These abnormalities increase the risk of vulnerability to relapse during oxycodone abstinence in some individuals. Scientists are now working to identify susceptibility factors that play a role in boosting the risk of relapse. Adequate sleep may be critical for successful recovery from opioid addiction.

Researchers conducting this study explored how the opioid epidemic in the US continues and evolved during the ongoing COVID pandemic. Women have made up the majority of those prescribed opioids for pain treatment. Prescribed opioids for pain management became the primary conduit to abuse and addiction for women, and the researchers found that mitigations in opioid prescriptions have been followed by increases in the use of other substances, such as heroin and fentanyl, in both men and women. While the rate of opioid use and overdose is higher in men, women have a higher rate of overdose death. Understanding how opioid use and addiction differ in their effect on men and women is key to ending the epidemic.

A rat model was also used to evaluate sex differences in vulnerability to addiction. Their results indicate activation of a specific subset of receptors for oestrogens enhances established cocaine-seeking behaviors in female rats. In male rats, the preference for cocaine under the same circumstances was reduced, involving the area of the brain linked to compulsive behaviours. Females show a greater response than males to stimulants such as amphetamine and cocaine in part due to the gonadal hormone oestradiol, which is one of the three forms of oestrogen. The hope is these results will lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms of addiction-related behaviors and the development of sex-specific treatments for addiction.

Source: American Physiological Society

Categories : Cardiovascular Disease GenderTags :

Not Enough Women in Stroke Clinical Trials

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A new study published in Neurology shows that women are underrepresented in stroke clinical trials compared to the proportion who have strokes in the general population. 

“Making sure there are enough women in clinical studies to accurately reflect the proportion of women who have strokes may have implications for future treatment recommendations for women affected by this serious condition,” said study author Cheryl Carcel, MD, of The George Institute for Global Health in Sydney, Australia. “When one sex is underrepresented in clinical trials, it limits the way you can apply the results to the general public and can possibly limit access to new therapies.”

The study analysed 281 stroke trials conducted between 1990 and 2020, with a total of 588 887 participants. Of these, only 37.4 % were women. The average prevalence of stroke in women across the countries included was 48%.

Results were calculated in participation-to-prevalence ratio, a relative measure that weights the percentage of women in a trial compared to their proportion in the total population with that disease. A ratio of one indicates that the percentage of women in the study is the same as the percentage of women with the disease in the general population. An acceptable range for an ideal ratio of female participation is between 0.8 and 1.2.

Overall, women were found to be underrepresented relative to their prevalence in the underlying population, with a consistent ratio of 0.84 over time. They found the greatest differences in trials of intracerebral haemorrhage, with a ratio of 0.73; trials with average participant age under 70, with a ratio of 0.81; non-acute interventions, with a ratio of 0.80; and rehabilitation trials, with a ratio 0.77.

“Our findings have implications for how women with stroke may be treated in the future, as women typically have worse functional outcomes after stroke and require more supportive care,” Dr Carcel said. “We will only achieve more equitable representation of women in clinical trials when researchers look at the barriers that are keeping women from enrolling in studies and actively recruit more women. People who fund the research also need to demand more reliable, sex-balanced evidence.”

Source: American Academy of Neurology

Categories : Cardiovascular Disease Diet and NutritionTags :

Moderate Carbohydrate Intake Helps CVD Health in Women

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In a surprise finding, Monash University researchers have reported that proportional carbohydrate intake and not saturated fat was significantly associated with cardiovascular disease benefit in Australian women.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in women. Poor diet is recognised as both an independent CVD risk factor and a contributor to other CVD risk factors, such as obesity, diabetes mellitus (DM), hypertension, and dyslipidaemia.

In middle-aged Australian women, it was found that increasing the percentage of carbohydrate intake was linked to reduced risks of CVD, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and obesity.

Furthermore, a moderate carbohydrate intake between 41.0–44.3% of total energy intake was associated with the lowest risk of CVD, compared to women who consumed less than 37% energy as carbohydrates. However, no significant relationship was demonstrated between proportional carbohydrate intake and all-cause mortality.

Furthermore, increasing proportional saturated fat intake was not associated with cardiovascular disease or mortality in women; rather, increasing saturated fat intake correlated with lower odds of developing diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and obesity.

The findings are now published in the British Medical Journal.

The results contradict much of the historical epidemiological research that supported a link between saturated fat and CVD. Instead, the results mirror contemporary meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies where saturated fat was found to have no significant relationship with total mortality or CVD.

Historical studies neglected to adjust for fibre, which is known to help prevent plaque from forming in the arteries, which may explain this discrepancy with older literature.

“Controversy still exists surrounding the best diet to prevent CVD,” said Sarah Zaman, an associate professor at the University of Sydney.

“A low-fat diet has historically been the mainstay of primary prevention guidelines, but the major issue within our dietary guidelines is that many dietary trials have predominately involved male participants or lacked sex-specific analyses.”

She added: “Further research is needed to tailor our dietary guidelines according to sex.”

First author Sarah Gribbin, a Doctor of Medicine and BMedSc (Hons) student, said: “As an observational study, our findings only show association and not causation. Our research is purely hypothesis-generating. We are hoping that our findings will spark future research into sex-specific dietary research.”

Source: Monash University