Examining Assumptions about Female Dominance in Autoimmune Disease

摘要

Autoimmune diseases are generally increasing in the United States and many other countries, for poorly understood reasons, affecting tens of millions of people.1 Environmental factors are among the suspects behind these diseases, because genetic factors alone can’t explain the significant rise in recent decades of diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Crohn disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, and type 1 diabetes. One common assumption that many experts have adopted, based on evidence pieced together over the decades, is that females are affected more than males by autoimmune diseases.1,2,3 But the key assumption that females are more susceptible to autoimmune diseases may be wrong in certain circumstances, says J. Michael Pollard, an associate professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.