Palgrave, 2008
“Marianne Legato, who has devoted her career to studying the differences between the sexes, believes that the premature death of men is the most important–and neglected–health issue of our time. She has written a book for every man who wants to live longer and for the women and families who love them. Dr. Legato has started a much needed conversation we should all be having about how we can improve the health and longevity of men, who–at all ages–die before women.”
— Dr. Mehmet Oz, author of You: The Owner’s Manual
“A vital and rewarding book…a fascinating as well as practical look at how men are both made (by biology) and shaped (by culture). Readers will be engaged and amazed by the discoveries and insights that modern medicine now possesses about the mysteries of gender. Dr. Legato has a gift for narrative and an ability to see into the human heart.”
— Diane Salvatore, Editor in Chief, Ladies’ Home Journal
It is a universal fact that men die before women. But the causes of this have long remained unexplored. In this trailblazing book, Dr. Marianne Legato–an expert in gender specific health–examines the reasons behind men’s fragility and explains what they need to do to live longer.
A bestselling author and Professor of Medicine at Columbia University, Dr. Legato shows how the forces of culture and biology conspire against male mortality. Drawing on the latest research and narrated through the lives of her patients, she delves into problems that both men and women care about– from why the male fetus is at greater risk, to why boys have a hard time adjusting to school, to how elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol make men more prone to aggression and why they are more likely to die from cardiac arrest or cancer and even depression.
Why Men Die First offers specific advice on what men can do to live better, including
- How on-one time with young boys reduces Anxiety and attention deficit problems
- Lifestyle changes that can prevent cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis
- Why young men take on high risk endeavors and how to decrease the stress
- How to cope with mid life depression and feelings of emasculation and uselessness
- How testosterone shots can mitigate the unpleasant symptoms of aging
Marianne J. Legato (Author)
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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.”
