New Delhi: Genetics may not solely explain the biology which cause different health risks, symptoms and outcomes between men and women — social factors such as neighbourhood and lifestyle too need to be looked at, according to a study.
The research, led by Queen Mary University, UK, analysed genetic links between nearly 6,000 proteins and diseases in 56,000 people.
A “very small” fraction — around 100 proteins — were found to be responsible for differing levels of majority of the 6,000 proteins studied between men and women.
Findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, “clearly show that with very few exceptions, protein regulating genetic variants identified so far behave in a very similar way in males and females,” Claudia Langenberg, director of Precision Healthcare University Research Institute, Queen Mary University, said.
“This provides evidence for an important implicit assumption — that insights arising from studying these (genetic) variants apply to both sexes,” Langenberg said.
The study highlights the importance of looking beyond genetics and medical factors, such as hormones, and looking at non-medical, social factors — where people work and live, education, lifestyle, finances — when comparing health risks and outcomes between men and women, the authors said.
The study’s findings are “essential to guide precision medicine approaches and identify where one size may not fit all”, Langenberg said.
Precision, or personalised, medicine takes into account one’s genes, environment and lifestyle for preventing or treating a disease.
“For the first time in history, we are able to study human biology at this level of detail — across genes, proteins, and more. This is the largest study to date exploring the similarities and differences in how our genetic code regulates blood protein levels between sexes,” lead author Mine Koprulu, a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary University’s Precision Healthcare University Research Institute, said.
“Our findings highlight the need to better understand the factors that impact health differences — at the genetic level and beyond — to create more tailored and equitable healthcare for everyone,” Koprulu said.
For the study, data from the UK Biobank and ‘Fenland Study’ — which is examining how genetics interact with environmental factors in metabolic disorders, such as obesity and diabetes — was analysed.
“Our results that collectively add to an emerging body of literature, that strong differences in health between the sexes later in life cannot be fully explained by sex-differential or even sex-discordant effects of genetic susceptibility in individual genetic (regions),” the authors wrote.
