Eupedia Forums
Site NavigationEupedia Top > Eupedia Forum & Japan Forum
Results 1 to 3 of 3

Thread: Why do women get more auto-immune diseases than men

  1. #1
    Advisor Achievements:
    VeteranThree Friends50000 Experience PointsRecommendation Second Class
    Posting Award
    Angela's Avatar
    Join Date
    Points: 310,307, Level: 100
    Overall activity: 99.6%

    Ethnic group
    Country: USA - New York

    Why do women get more auto-immune diseases than men


    Well, here we go, there is one reason to get pregnant more often.

    "Autoimmune diseases turn people’s own immune systems against their bodies. In the United States alone, women represent 80 percent of all cases of autoimmune disease. Women are 16 times more likely than men to get Sjogren’s syndrome, in which the immune system goes after the glands that make tears and saliva, and nine times more likely to have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, in which it sets its sights on the thyroid. Sjogren’s forced Venus Williams to drop out of the U.S. Open in 2011. The singer Selena Gomez underwent a kidney transplant after suffering complications from lupus, which is eight times more common in women than in men."

    When the placenta grows during pregnancy, the organ sends signals to the mother’s immune system to change its activity so that the mother’s body doesn’t eject the placenta and the fetus. This might even mean turning down the immune system in some ways, or for some periods of time. Turning down the immune system too much, though, risks leaving women sensitive to pathogens, which would also be bad for the fetus. So instead the mother’s immune system ramps up in other ways throughout adulthood, Wilson and her colleagues think, so as to remain vigilant against germs even when some of its parts become dormant during pregnancies.Things get complicated, however, when those pregnancies don’t actually occur. Women today tend to have far fewer children—fewer than two on average in the United States, according to the CDC. Wilson reasons that without a more or less constant pushback from placentas during pregnancies—the pushback that women’s immune systems have evolved to anticipate—the immune system can get too aggressive, too ramped up. It starts looking for things to attack that aren’t dangerous, which is how autoimmune diseases set in.

    For millions of years, minus the past 100, “the immune system was expecting to have exposure to a placenta,” Wilson says. Imagine if you’re pulling on something heavy, and then the rope snaps. “If you suddenly don’t have that heavy thing anymore,” she says, “you’re gonna go off the moon.”
    This is certainly not the first theory for why women suffer from more autoimmune disease than men do. One has to do with a protein called BAFF; another has to do with the fact that women have two X chromosomes instead of one. The way Wilson sees it, the pregnancy-compensation hypothesis synthesizes many of the previous theories into one and provides the evolutionary explanation behind them. “They were all right,” she says. “But everyone was looking under their own streetlight, and we just waited for it to be daytime.”

    I'm not so sure about all of this. One of my grandmothers had 11 children, and the other 5, and they both had what I think was undiagnosed rheumatoid arthritis, or something related to it, later in life. It also varies by ethnicity. Both Jews and Italians tend to have more of them.


  2. #2
    Regular Member Achievements:
    1 year registered1000 Experience Points
    ToBeOrNotToBe's Avatar
    Join Date

    Country: United Kingdom

    I think it's more of a testosterone thing as low test males also have higher levels inflammation

  3. #3
    Regular Member Achievements:
    Tagger Second Class1000 Experience Points1 year registered
    edulofter's Avatar
    Join Date
    Points: 1,121, Level: 8
    Level completed: 86%, Points required for next Level: 29
    Overall activity: 0%

    Country: China

    1 members found this post helpful.
    thank you for your sharing. This is a very interesting and valuable scientific study.
    There are indeed big differences between men and women in the autoimmune system.
    check this new research about it :

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts