Dr. Marianne Legato WINS PROSE AWARD for “Gender in the Genomic Era”
Legato’s text book helping women receive accurate health care.
New York City: Dr. Marianne J. Legato, MD, PhD (hon c), FACP, an internationally renowned academic, physician, author, lecturer, and pioneer in the field of gender-specific medicine, recently won the PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine for the third edition of her book, “Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine, Gender in the Genomic Era. Third Edition” published by Elsevier.
For more information and to contact Dr. Legato go to: https://gendermed.org/dr-legato.
The PROSE awards annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in 58 categories. Judged by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals since 1976, the PROSE Awards are extraordinary for their breadth and depth.
Said Dr. Legato: “I am enormously proud to have received this award on behalf of our work on the biological differences between the sexes. Men and women have distinctly different bodies and often experience disease and its treatment in unique, sex-specific ways. The importance of assessing health and treating disease in both sexes cannot be underestimated. Distinctions like this award go a long way in alerting the medical community to the myriad of ways in which biological sex and gender impact our health.”
About Gender Specific Medicine: The American medical community and policy-makers realized that “protecting” women from the potential dangers of medical research was doing them a disservice. By the early 1990s, women began participating in direct clinical trials. While the scientific community initially resisted the change, the result was a discovery of differences in the physiology of women and men in normal health as well as in their response to the same diseases. The discoveries opened the gateway to a new science: gender-specific medicine. The evolution of gender-specific medicine is akin to the emergence of pediatrics, which evolved because of an increasing awareness of the fact that children were not simply small adults. Their physiology, diseases, and treatment are age specific.
Marianne J. Legato, MD, Ph. D. (hon. c.), FACP is an internationally renowned academic, physician, author, lecturer, and pioneer in the field of gender-specific medicine. She is a Professor Emerita of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Legato is also the Director of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine, which she founded in 2006 as a continuation of her work with The Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University. She received an honorary PhD from the University of Panama in 2015 for her work on the differences between men and women.
At its core, gender-specific medicine is the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women and how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender. Dr. Legato’s discoveries and those of her colleagues have led to a personalization of medicine that assists doctors worldwide in understanding the difference in normal function of men and women and in their sex-specific experiences of the same diseases.
She began her work in gender-specific medicine by authoring the first book on women and heart disease, The Female Heart: The Truth About Women and Coronary Artery Disease, which won the Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association in 1992. Because of this research, the cardiovascular community began to include women in clinical trials affirming the fact that the risk factors, symptoms, and treatment of the same disease can be significantly different between the sexes. Convinced that the sex-specific differences in coronary artery disease were not unique, Dr. Legato began a wide-ranging survey of all medical specialties and in 2004, published the first textbook on gender-specific medicine, The Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine. The second edition appeared in 2010 and the third edition, dedicated to explaining how gender impacts biomedical investigation in the genomic era, won the PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine from the Association of American Publishers in 2018. A fourth edition is forthcoming.
She also founded the first scientific journals publishing new studies in the field, The Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine, and a newer version, Gender Medicine, both listed in the Index Medicus of the National Library of Medicine. She has founded a third peer-reviewed, open access journal, Gender and the Genome, which focuses on the impact of biological sex on technology and its effects on human life.
Dr. Legato is the author of multiple works, including: What Women Need to Know (Simon & Schuster, 1997), Eve’s Rib (Harmony Books, 2002), Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget (Rodale, 2005), Why Men Die First (Palgrave, 2008), The International Society for Gender Medicine: History and Highlights (Academic Press, 2017), and most recently, The Plasticity of Sex (Academic Press, 2020). Her books have been translated into 28 languages to date.
As an internationally respected authority on gender medicine, Dr. Legato has chaired symposia and made keynote addresses to world congresses in gender-specific medicine in Berlin, Israel, Italy, Japan, Panama, South Korea, Stockholm, and Vienna. In collaboration with the Menarini Foundation, she is co-chairing a symposium on epigenetics, Sex, Gender and Epigenetics: From Molecule to Bedside, to be held in Spring 2021 in Italy. She maintains one of the only gender-specific private practice in New York City, and she has earned recognition as one of the “Top Doctors in New York.”
