It is known that most cancers occur more in men than in women. What are the reasons for the gender difference?
To this end, researchers at the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health recently conducted a Diet and Health Study (NIH-AARP Diet) conducted by the National Institutes of Health and the American Association of Retirees (AARP) from 1995 to 2011. and Health study) of 294,100 volunteers (171,274 men and 122,826 women) were analyzed.
The researchers assessed differences between men and women across 21 cancer sites. Among the first cancer diagnoses, 17,951 were male and 8,742 were female.
Analysis of the data showed that the imbalance could be explained by biological differences between men and women rather than behavioral or lifestyle factors such as smoking or drinking, body mass index and height, physical activity, eating habits, drugs, and medical history.
Male-specific biological traits cause gender differences to emerge
The only cancers diagnosed less in men than in women were gallbladder and thyroid cancers. For esophageal adenocarcinoma, men were 10.80 times more likely to be diagnosed than women. In addition, men had a higher risk of developing bladder cancer 3.3 times, gastric cardia cancer 3.49 times, and laryngeal cancer 3.53 times.
“In addition to external factors known to cause cancer, our findings suggest that sex and gender-related biological factors are key determinants of cancer development,” said study lead author Sarah S. Jackson, PhD. “Understanding the gender-related biological mechanisms that make cancer more prevalent in women could have important implications for disease etiology and prevention.”
The researchers found that behavioral and lifestyle factors accounted for a statistically significant proportion of the increased incidence of esophageal adenocarcinoma and cancers of the liver, other biliary tract, bladder, skin, colon, rectum, and lungs in men, although in many cases the proportion was low. The impact of risk factors varied from 11% for esophageal adenocarcinoma to 50% for lung cancer.
Why women are less likely to get cancer, hormones and X influences
Jackson noted that estrogen could affect immune signaling pathways as one mechanism by which women may have an advantage against cancer development. She also explained that there are tumor suppressor genes on the X chromosome, which women have one more X chromosome than men, so their expression levels may be higher.
The results of this study were published in the American Cancer Society journal Cancer under the title ‘Sex disparities in the incidence of 21 cancer types: Quantification of the contribution of risk factors’.
Reporter Jeong Hee-eun eun@kormedi.com
ⓒ ‘Honest knowledge for health’ Comedy.com (https://kormedi.com) / Unauthorized reproduction-redistribution prohibited