During the 8th Congress of the International Society for Gender Medicine, Dr. Marianne Legato delivered one of three keynote addresses (“Presidential Address”) during the course of the congress. The Congress was a great success with approximately 250 participants from 18 different countries. The main theme of the conference was “Trends in Gender Medicine: Super-Aging Society and Globalization.” Two hundred different topics were presented encompassing ideas and views of the international participants.
Thank You Letter from Dr. Yasmin Farhadian – 2017 Travel Grant Winner Sponsored by The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine
September 14th, 2017
Marianne J. Legato, Founder and Director
Wendy Dauber, Executive Director
The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine, Inc.
Dear Prof. Legato and Ms. Dauber,
I would like to thank you very much for helping me attend the 8th Congress of the International Society for Gender Medicine in Sendai. My attendance was only possible due to the generosity of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine and your Travel Gran Award. This is my first opportunity to engage in the international research arena in this field. Thanks to the fantastic infrastructure and frameworks in Israel I have already presented my research in conferences and seminars. In thanks to having those experiences I’m all the more grateful for the opportunity to present my research at the Congress of the International Society for Gender Medicine.
Only a week ago did I graduate from medical school in Israel. My main goals in the field of medicine are to provide, to the best of my abilities, the best possible heath care to my future patients. At the sane time I strive to excel in research and teaching. These will only be possible if I am able to garner knowledge and skills. In this content, I am deeply grateful for your grant. There is no doubt that attending the congress promotes these goals.
Is is a deep belief of mine that gender based medicine is a leading factor in the medicine world. For this reason I’m constantly searching for new ways to collaborate and new ideas to implement that will benefit the global medical community. Meeting such as the international congress are prime opportunities to forge the ideas and explore collaboration and innovation. Again, I’d like to express how thankful I am for this opportunity that you are giving me. I’m fully obligated to make the most of it, as well of what it will lead to.
Gratefully yours,
Yasmin Farhadian
New Media Manager
Israeli Society for Gender Medicine
Entsuji Temple, Japan
Matsushima Bay, Japan
Yasmin Farhadian and Dr. Legato
The 8th Congress of the International Society for Gender Medicine Sendai, Japan
Date: September 14-16, 2017
Location: Kyoto, Japan
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.”
