7 Surprising Health Conditions That Affect Men More Than Women

By Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW

Sex and gender differences are central to our lives. We all think about them, struggle with them, and seek to better understand them. From Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady who lamented “Why can’t a woman be more like a man”; to Sigmund Freud who wondered “What do women really want?”; to our nursery rhymes which taught us to believe that “Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice,” while “Little boys are made of snakes and snails and puppy-dogs tails”; to Charles Boyer who proclaimed Vive La Différence!

For more than 40 years I have been conducting research on gender-specific medicine and health-care. At MenAlive we have been helping men and the women who love them to live fully and joyfully at all stages of their lives. Although men and women are alike in many ways, there are also important differences. Understanding these differences can help us all live well.

There are 10 trillion cells in human body and every one of them is sex specific according to research scientist David C. Page, M.D., professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the of the Whitehead Institute.  Marianne J. Legato, M.D, author of Eve’s Rib:  The New Science of Gender-Specific Medicine says, “Everywhere we look, the two sexes are startlingly and unexpectedly different not only in their internal function but in the way they experience illness.”

It has been said that our genomes are 99% identical from one person to the next. “It turns out that this assertion is correct,” says Dr. Page, “as long as the two individuals being compared are both men. It’s also correct if the two individuals being compared are both women. However, if you compare the genome of a man with the genome of a woman, you’ll find that they are only 98.5% identical. In other words the genetic difference between a man and a woman are 15 times greater than the genetic difference between two men or between two women.”

Even in this era of genetic research, this fundamental difference has been overlooked.

“We’ve had a unisex vision of the human genome,” says Dr. Page. “Men and women are not equal in our genome and men and women are not equal in the face of disease.” According to Dr. Legato and her team at The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine here are conditions that affect males more than females

*Boy babies are twice as likely to die before birth than girls. Although approximately 240 males are conceived for every 100 girls, the ratio of boys to girls at birth is 1.05 to 1.

*Because of the later maturation in males of the part of the brain that weighs risks and moderates impulsive behavior, adolescent boys are more likely than girls to: Take life-threatening risks,

*Commit suicide and

*Die violently than girls of the same age.

*There are more overweight males than females and males are more likely than females to identify binge eating as normal.

*Men are less likely than women to recover their speech after a stroke.

*Coronary artery disease strikes men almost two decades earlier than it does women; most men with coronary artery disease are dead by the time they are 65.  Heart disease presents differently in men and women: men more often feel a crashing pain in their chest; women more often experience fleeting pain in the upper abdomen, shortness of breath, and sweating.

“We need to build a better tool kit for researchers that is XX and XY informed rather than our current gender neutral stance,” says Dr. Page. “We need a tool kit that recognizes the fundamental difference on a cellular, organ, system, and person level between XY and XX. I believe that if we do this, we will arrive at a fundamentally new paradigm for understanding and treating human disease.”

Jed Diamond, PhD, MCSW, is the Founder and Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live long and well. Though focused on men’s health, MenAliveis also for women who care about the health of the men in their lives. Diamond’s book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, brings together the wisdom accumulated in 40 years helping more than 20,000 men, women, and children.