M. A. “Tonette" Krousel-Wood, MD, 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, and Franck Mauvais-Jarvis, MD, director of Tulane's Center of Excellence in Sex-Based Biology & Medicine, will use the grant to investigate how differences in sex and gender can impact health outcomes and shape new treatments. The COBRE will fund a wide spectrum of innovative research involving investigators from across the university. This includes a first-of-its-kind investigation of how biological sex and estrogen impact pneumonia infections — and why women are more susceptible. Researchers will also work to engineer sex-specific, miniaturized models of human tissues and organs to study sex differences in diseases without the need for animal models.
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 five-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.
“Adult males and females are different patient populations; you cannot pool them together,” Mauvais-Jarvis said. “They don’t have the same heart attacks. Females are more likely to get autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. The differences are not just due to testosterone and estrogen. There’s something else.”