The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine has collaborated with the Johns Hopkins faculty for the first in a series of symposia. This symposium reviewed some of the most common illnesses and the sex-specific manifestations and treatment of these illnesses. Furthermore, this symposium aimed to inform health care professionals to learn about gender and sex-differences in the presentation, perception and management of disease. It is of great interest that the public routinely asks for physicians educated in the science of gender-specific medicine and that to date, no specific or well organized body of evidence- based practice recommendations for all the subspecialties of medicine has yet been assembled. We are planning more collaborative symposia like this one to underscore the need to increase research where gender is a significant variable and to develop and teach sex-specific strategies for the treatment of disease.
1) Rehka Kumar
- Rehka Kumar, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Attending Endocrinologist, Weill Cornell Medical College
2) Pamela Ouyang, Myron L. Weisfeldt, Marianne J. Legato
- Pamela Ouyang, MD, Professor of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, Director, Johns Hopkins Women’s Cardiovascular Health Center
- Myron L. Weisfeldt, MD, Professor of Medicine, Former Director, Department of Medicine
- Marianne J. Legato, MD, FACP, Emerita Professor of Clinical Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeon, Adjunct Professor of Medicine Johns Hopkins Medical School, Director, The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine
3) Terri L. Cornelison
- Terri L. Cornelison, M.D., Ph.D., FACOG Assistant Professor, Gynecologic Oncology Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Sex Matters: Update in Gender Specific Patient Care February 13, 2015
PROGRAM February 13, 2015
7:30 ‐ 8:00 Registration and Continental Breakfast
8:00 ‐ 8:15 Introduction and Conference Goals Marianne Legato, MD, FACP
8:15 ‐ 8:30 Introduction and Conference Goals Myron Weisfeldt, MD
8:30 ‐ 9:00 Gender Differences in the Presentation and Treatment of Depression Karen Swartz, MD
9:00 ‐ 9:30 Sex Differences in Dementia Cynthia Munro, PhD
9:30 ‐ 10:00 Gender‐Specific Considerations in the Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Headaches Jason Rosenberg, MD
10:00 ‐ 10:30 Refreshment Break
10:30 ‐ 11:00 I’d Love to Lose Ten Pounds: How To Deal With the Overweight Patient Rehka Kumar, MD
11:00 ‐ 11:30 Boning Up on Osteoporosis in Men and Women: A Separate But Equal Disease? Kendall Moseley, MD
11:30 ‐ 12:00 Sexual Dimorphism in the Immune System and the Implications for Autoimmunity Jennifer Mammen, MD, PhD
12:00 ‐ 2:00 Lunch and Lectures
- Tales of the Heart: It’s Not Always What It Seems Kirsten Healy, MD
- Testosterone Replacement Therapy in Older Men Adrian Dobs, MD
2:00 ‐ 2:30 Sex Disparities in Urological Cancers Armine Smith, MD
2:30 ‐ 3:00 Chasing Sleep: Differences in Sleep Between Men and Women Grace Pien, MD
3:00 ‐ 3:30 Gender‐Specific Medicine in the Genomic Era: What Are the Questions and How Do We Find the Answers? Marianne Legato, MD, FACP
3:30 ‐ 4:00 Closing Remarks Pamela Ouyang, MD Sex Matters: Update in Gender-Specific Patient Care
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine takes responsibility for the content, quality and scientific integrity of this CME activity.
The schedule is subject to change.
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.”
