Abstract
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The authors did not receive specific funding for this work. The ON laboratory is supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Fondation pour la Recherche Medicale (FRM), the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), and the European Union. The LQM laboratory is supported by the Institut Pasteur, CNRS, FRM and ANR. The funders had no role in decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. Provenance: Commissioned, externally peer reviewed.
Highlights
N The role of biological gender has been determined in a number of infectious and noninfectious diseases
A recent association study screening variation at 18 genes involved in the Tolllike receptor (TLR) pathway identified four polymorphisms in the TLR8 gene, which is located on chromosome X (Xp22), which seemed to be associated with complex susceptibility to pulmonary TB in an Indonesian cohort [34]
Large prevalence surveys have suggested that the sex bias observed in pulmonary TB cases may result partly from genuine biological differences in male and female susceptibility to M. tuberculosis infection or the development of TB disease
Summary
Tuberculosis (TB) claims over 1.7 million lives throughout the world each year according to the most recent World Health Organization (WHO) report [1]. Men seem to be more affected than women, with a male/female ratio of 1.960.6 for the worldwide case notification rate (Box 1; Figure 1) [1] In some countries this ratio may reach values as high as 3 (4.7 in Armenia for instance), but ratios below 1 are extremely rare and mostly correspond to very small populations of patients [1]. Several reviews have discussed the possibility of undernotification of women due to greater difficulties in gaining access to clinics and in obtaining a timely diagnosis and treatment, in developing countries [2] Other confounding factors, such as smoking, alcohol and drug use, exposure to indoor dusts and air pollution, as well as the poor quality of sputum samples collected from women in some regions, may influence the sex bias observed in patients with TB [3,4,5,6,7,8]. Research in Translation discusses health interventions in the context of translation from basic to clinical research, or from clinical evidence to practice
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