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Itongadol.- While modern society strives to reach equality between men and women, the scientific community has often raised the question of whether gender differences could affect our health and well-being. A new Israeli study shows that gender differences affect autism and Alzheimer’s disease; its results could potentially help in improving treatment for other illnesses as well.
Autism and Alzheimer’s are cognitive-physical conditions that pose great difficulties for the patient, family and friends. While men are more likely to have autism with a ratio of three to one, women are more likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. At this point, medicine can only offer limited treatments for these conditions, but this new Tel Aviv University study could shed light on how these diseases are formed, and more specifically, on what drives their development – so that doctors can better treat them.
The new research focuses on how a certain gene called ADNP – which regulates 400 proteins involved in the development of the human body – is causing gender-specific tendencies towards autism and Alzheimer’s disease. This means that to find a cure, men and women should be tested separately because they may respond differently to treatment.
Male and female mice have different cognitive abilities
In the study, researchers removed the ADNP gene from mice, and compared them to mice that had the gene. The mice showed gender-specific learning and memory differences: Male mice that had the gene removed expressed degraded object recognition, which means they could not identify objects well. They also exhibited degraded social memory.
Female mice of the same test group, however, showed social deficiency without degraded object recognition. “The gene’s gender-dependent expression changes male and female chemical tendencies toward different neurological disorders,” TAU’s Prof. Ilana Gozes said in a statement. “Male and female mice may look the same and their brains may look the same, but they are not. When the expression of ADNP is different, it may cause different behaviors and different cognitive abilities.”