If a man and a woman each suffer a heart attack, you may assume the symptoms and diagnoses should be the same. That's not always the case. While men are more likely to show the more "typical" signs of a heart attack -; chest pains, shortness of breath -; women are more likely to experience pain in their necks or symptoms that feel like heartburn or nausea.
An angiogram that shows a blockage in male blood vessels may not show occlusion in a woman's smaller vessels, and these differences can lead to misdiagnoses or lack of treatment. Tulane University has received a 5-year, $11.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish a Center of Biological Research Excellence (COBRE) in Sex-Based Precision Medicine.
The center will explore the differences between biological sexes and genders, investigate how those differences can impact medical outcomes, and potentially help shape specialized treatments. Principal investigators Dr. Franck Mauvais-Jarvis, professor of medicine and director of the Center of Excellence in Sex-Based Biology & Medicine at Tulane University, and Dr.
M.A. "Tonette" Krousel-Wood, the Jack Aron Chair in Primary Care Medicine and the director of the Center for Health Outcomes, Implementation and Community Engaged Sciences (CHOICES) at Tulane University, will lead the center's efforts to examine the biological sex and gender differences in pursuit of more equitable medical treatments.
Adult males and females are different patient populations; y.
