Women
Examples of sex-related illnesses in female humans:
- 99% of breast cancer occurs in women.
- Ovarian cancer, and other diseases of the female reproductive system occur only in women. Endometriosis, another female reproductive disorder occurs almost exclusively in women, but has rarely been found in men undergoing estrogen treatment for prostate cancer.
- More women than men suffer from osteoporosis
- Autoimmune diseases, such as Sjögren's syndrome and scleroderma, are more prevalent in women. An estimated 75 percent of those living with autoimmune diseases are female. For more information on sex and autoimmune diseases, see Autoimmunity.
- In Western cultures, more women than men suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia
- Alzheimer's disease has a higher rate in women than in men.
- Women are more likely to suffer from unipolar clinical depression (although bipolar disorder appears to affect both sexes equally)
- Psychologists are more likely to diagnose women than men with borderline or histrionic personality disorder. There is no current agreement on whether this is because of a real underlying difference between the sexes, or simply because of deeply ingrained social attitudes.
Read more about this topic: Sex And Illness
Famous quotes containing the word women:
“Most days I feel like an acrobat high above a crowd out of which my own parents, my in-laws, potential employers, phantoms of “other women who do it” and a thousand faceless eyes stare up.”
—Anonymous Mother. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 2 (1978)
“The belief that established science and scholarship—which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making—are “objective” and “value-free” and that feminist studies are “unscholarly,” “biased,” and “ideological” dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Men seem more bound to the wheel of success than women do. That women are trained to get satisfaction from affiliation rather than achievement has tended to keep them from great achievement. But it has also freed them from unreasonable expectations about the satisfactions that professional achievement brings.”
—Phyllis Rose (b. 1942)