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WEDNESDAY, Sept. 16, 2020<\/p>\n
Researchers say your biological sex affects gene expression in nearly every type of tissue — influencing body fat, cancer<\/a> and birth weight.<\/p>\n Gene expression is the amount of product created by a gene for cell function, the international team of researchers explained.<\/p>\n They said their findings could prove important for personalized medicine, creating new drugs<\/a> and predicting patient outcomes.<\/p>\n “These discoveries suggest the importance of considering sex as a biological variable in human genetics and genomics studies,” said project leader Barbara Stranger, an associate professor of pharmacology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.<\/p>\n The researchers analyzed 44 types of healthy human tissue from 838 people to find out if there were differences between women and men in the average amount of gene expression.<\/p>\n They discovered that 37% of all human genes were expressed at different levels in women and men in at least one type of tissue.<\/p>\n They also identified 369 instances where a genetic variant present in males and females affected gene expression to a different degree in each sex. This led to the discovery of 58 previously unreported links between genes and blood pressure<\/a>, cholesterol levels<\/a>, breast cancer<\/a> and body fat percentage.<\/p>\n Gender differences in gene expression were also found for genes involved in how the body responds to medications, how women control blood sugar<\/a> levels in pregnancy<\/a>, how the immune system functions and how cancer<\/a> develops.<\/p>\n “If specific genes or genetic variants contribute differentially to a given trait in males and females, it could suggest sex-specific biomarkers, therapeutics and drug dosing,” Stranger said in a Northwestern news release.<\/p>\n “In the future, such knowledge may form a critical component of personalized medicine or may reveal disease biology that remains obscured when considering males and females as a single group,” she said.<\/p>\n The study was published Sept. 10 in the journal Science<\/i>.<\/p>\n — Robert Preidt<\/p>\n ![\"MedicalNews\"](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/HealthDay\/healthday.png\")
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