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Why do women develop M.S. more than men?

Submitted by art on Fri, 2005-01-28 08:37.

Why do women develop multiple sclerosis (MS) almost twice as often as men? Physicians have long been intrigued by this fact -- and now a Mayo Clinic-led international research team has identified a genetic variation that may explain it. The report from collaborators in Minnesota, Northern Ireland, Belgium and Italy appears in the Jan. 27 online publication of the journal Genes & Immunity. Summary story here.

The researchers compared MS in four patient populations. They found that men have the gene variant that causes high levels of interferon gamma less often than women. Says Dr. Weinshenker, “It seems as if men have a lower frequency of high secretion interferon gamma genetic variant, and that might explain why men are generally protected more from MS.”

Research by scientists at the Cleveland Clinic has shown that women and men naturally express different levels of interferon gamma. Experiments elsewhere showed that high levels of interferon gamma could intensify the MS damage processes and make the disease worse.

Just to clarify...

Submitted by hollie on Fri, 2005-01-28 15:30.
Something in the EurekAlert caught my attention so I thought I'd post a comment. The article seems to imply that women inherit a certain IFNg variant more frequently than men, which may explain why they develop MS more frequently. However, the IFNg gene is on chromosome 12, which we all inherit two copies of (one from our mother, one from our father) regardless of gender. Therefore any variant in the IFNg gene should theoretically be equally divided between men and women in the population at large. I believe what the study actually shows (although I haven't read the full paper) is that men *with MS* differ from women *with MS* in terms of how many have the particular IFNg variant under study (the variant that is associated with increased IFNg production). So the point to take away is that the genetic factors that influence whether a man get MS may be somewhat different from those that influence whether a woman gets MS. And some of these factors may be related to gender-based differences such as IFNg production.
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