Why do women get more auto-immune diseases than men

Angela

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See:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/06/women-autoimmune-diseases-pregnancy/591901/

Well, here we go, there is one reason to get pregnant more often.

"[FONT=&quot]Autoimmune diseases turn people’s own immune systems against their bodies. In the United States alone, women represent [/FONT]80 percent[FONT=&quot] of all cases of autoimmune disease. Women are 16 times more likely than men to get [/FONT]Sjogren’s syndrome[FONT=&quot], in which the immune system goes after the glands that make tears and saliva, and nine times more likely to have [/FONT]Hashimoto’s thyroiditis[FONT=&quot], in which it sets its sights on the thyroid. Sjogren’s forced Venus Williams [/FONT]to drop out[FONT=&quot] of the U.S. Open in 2011. The singer Selena Gomez [/FONT]underwent a kidney transplant[FONT=&quot] after suffering complications from lupus, which is eight times more common in women than in men."

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[FONT=&quot]When the placenta grows during pregnancy, the organ sends signals to the mother’s immune system to change its activity so that the mother’s body doesn’t eject the placenta and the fetus. This might even mean turning down the immune system in some ways, or for some periods of time. Turning down the immune system too much, though, risks leaving women sensitive to pathogens, which would also be bad for the fetus. So instead the mother’s immune system ramps up in other ways throughout adulthood, Wilson and her colleagues think, so as to remain vigilant against germs even when some of its parts become dormant during pregnancies.[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Things get complicated, however, when those pregnancies don’t actually occur. Women today tend to have far fewer children—fewer than two on average in the United States, according to the CDC. Wilson reasons that without a more or less constant pushback from placentas during pregnancies—the pushback that women’s immune systems have evolved to anticipate—the immune system can get too aggressive, too ramped up. It starts looking for things to attack that aren’t dangerous, which is how autoimmune diseases set in.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]For millions of years, minus the past 100, “the immune system was expecting to have exposure to a placenta,” Wilson says. Imagine if you’re pulling on something heavy, and then the rope snaps. “If you suddenly don’t have that heavy thing anymore,” she says, “you’re gonna go off the moon.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]This is certainly not the first theory for why women suffer from more autoimmune disease than men do. One has to do with a protein called BAFF; another has to do with the fact that women have two X chromosomes instead of one. The way Wilson sees it, the pregnancy-compensation hypothesis synthesizes many of the previous theories into one and provides the evolutionary explanation behind them. “They were all right,” she says. “But everyone was looking under their own streetlight, and we just waited for it to be daytime.”


I'm not so sure about all of this. One of my grandmothers had 11 children, and the other 5, and they both had what I think was undiagnosed rheumatoid arthritis, or something related to it, later in life. It also varies by ethnicity. Both Jews and Italians tend to have more of them. [/FONT]
 

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