A new study has explained why brain tumors occurred more often in males and regularly are more damaging than similar tumors in females.
The new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis recognized that retinoblastoma protein (RB), a protein known to lessen cancer risk, is significantly less active in male brain cells than in female brain cells.
Senior author Joshua Rubin, MD, PhD asserted that this was the first time anyone ever had identified a sex-linked difference that affected tumor risk and was essential to cells, and that was very exciting and these results suggested that they need to go back and look at multiple pathways linked to cancer, checking for sex differences.
Rubin said that male brain tumor risk remained higher throughout life despite major age-linked shifts in sex hormone production in males and females and if the sex hormones were causing this effect, the would see major changes in the relative rates of brain tumors in males and females at puberty but they did not happen then or later in life when menopause changed female sex hormone production.
Rubin added that there were other types of tumors that occurred at different rates based on sex, such as some liver cancers, which occur more often in males.
The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.