Women are also more likely to have a second heart attack within a year of their first one, said Dr. Sally Shaywitz, co-director of the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, and a professor of pediatrics at Yale University. Shaywitz, who also served on the special IOM panel, noted that there are other significant yet poorly understood differences. Now the challenge is to make sure the mechanisms are put in place to ensure better understanding of the basic differences between the sexes and that these differences are translated into clinical practice. These differences range from the subtle to the profound, said Pardue. Melanoma is most often diagnosed on the calves of women, but on men's backs, obviously because these are the areas exposed to the sun.
Men also have larger brains, but women have more neurons.
What's important is that even though men and women use different pathways in the brain, they end up to perform equally at most tasks. Men and women also use different brain organization when processing language, she continued. Men rely on the left inferior frontal area to carry out language tasks such as rhyming words, whereas women use both the right and left side to carry out the same task, a difference that may explain why women with left-brain stroke lose less language acuity than do men. Understanding the bases of these sex-based differences is important in developing new approaches to prevention, diagnosis and treatment. All rights reserved.