Panama 2015
This was an international conference on male health; our role was to discuss the hazards men face as a result of their relatively greater vulnerability to many diseases compared to women and the fact that their social responsibilities entail their holding more dangerous jobs, being encouraged to suppress/minimize their symptoms when ill and traditionally to bear the exclusive burden of being the subjects of clinical investigation.
We reviewed some of the salient differences in the physiology of men and women: sex impacts gene expression, the Y chromosome is unique and some feel it is doomed to extinction, and stressed that it is the male germ line that creates the genetic diversity that fuels the evolutionary process. We discussed the many reasons men die almost a decade earlier in life than women, tracing male vulnerability from intrauterine life through the post partum period, the differences in the male and female brain development, the unique vulnerabilities of the male adolescent, the role of testosterone in men’s behavior and the unique characteristics of depression in the male which lead to late diagnosis and undertreatment. The chief causes of male deaths vary with age: 6% of boys who die before 10 years of age are murdered; suicide, homicide and “unintentional injuries” are the leading causes of death between the ages of 15 and 34, and heart disease begins to claim men when they are only 35 years of age; by 45-50, it is the chief cause of death, killing 23% of men.