Frontiers in Bioscience-Elite (FBE) is published by IMR Press from Volume 13 Issue 2 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.
Sex, death and the (nerve) cell
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Men and women not only look different, but they have different risks of multiple diseases like migraine, neurodegenerative disorders or numerous cancers. Even the nerve cells may die in different ways and exhibit different sensitivity to pro-apoptotic factors. Some of the differences can be explained by the action of sex hormones, but the experiments on four core genotype mouse model, in which XX and XY mice can be of either sex showed that not all differences are due to hormones. An example of a disease with no simple explanation of sex bias is Leber hereditary optic neuropathy, a mitochondrial disease with about 4:1 male to female ratio. The apoptotic death of retinal ganglion cells forming an optic disc is a proposed mechanism of the disease pathophysiology. The mechanisms causing different sensitivity of the nerve cells of male and female subjects may be responsible for the gender bias in LHON and merit further studies.