Abstract
BackgroundSex differences in the incidences of cancers become a critical issue in both cancer research and the development of precision medicine. However, details in these differences have not been well reported. We provide a comprehensive analysis of sexual dimorphism in human cancers.MethodsWe analyzed four sets of cancer incidence data from the SEER (USA, 1975–2015), from the Cancer Registry at Mayo Clinic (1970–2015), from Sweden (1970–2015), and from the World Cancer Report in 2012.ResultsWe found that all human cancers had statistically significant sexual dimorphism with male dominance in the United States and mostly significant in the Mayo Clinic, Sweden, and the world data, except for thyroid cancer, which is female-dominant.ConclusionsSexual dimorphism is a clear but mostly neglected phenotype for most human cancers regarding the clinical practice of cancer. We expect that our study will facilitate the mechanistic studies of sexual dimorphism in human cancers. We believe that fully addressing the mechanisms of sexual dimorphism in human cancers will greatly benefit current development of individualized precision medicine beginning from the sex-specific diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.
Highlights
Sex differences in the incidences of cancers become a critical issue in both cancer research and the development of precision medicine
The overview of sex differences in the incidence of human cancers Based on organ specificities between sexes, we categorized human cancers into two groups: sex-dimorphic and sexspecific cancers
We investigated total 30 types of human cancers (Figs. 1 and 2, Table 1, and Additional file 1: Table S1-S3 and Figure S1-S2) and found that 24 of them were sexdimorphic with statistical significance, two of them were men-specific, and four of them were women-specific (breast cancer, cancer of the cervix uteri, cancer of the corpus and uterus, NOS, and ovarian cancer)
Summary
Sex differences in the incidences of cancers become a critical issue in both cancer research and the development of precision medicine. Details in these differences have not been well reported. Sex dimorphism is a critical phenotype of human cancers, the investigation of such important topic has been barely conducted, and most importantly, sex-specific clinical diagnosis and treatment of human cancers has been mostly overlooked. Multiple factors could contribute to sex dimorphism of human cancers, such as sex-specific genetic variations. Zheng et al BMC Cancer (2019) 19:684 the mechanistic studies of sex dimorphism in human cancers and developing sex-specific cancer precision medicine
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