Week9 oncogene

2016 Genomics

Week9_ essay

 

Why cancer is more dangerous to men?

 

                                                                                                                           20141497

                                                                                                                              Chaeeun Lee

Introduction

         Around the world, a lot of people suffer from cancer. Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. According to National Cancer Institute in U.S., cancer mortality is higher among men than women (207.9 per 100,000 men and 145.4 per 100,000 women). Therefore, it can be a problem that why it is more dangerous to men than women.

 

Result

         To begin with, there are different habits or life patterns between genders that can cause the difference. One of the things is smoking which can damage the DNA. This means the damaged DNA can cause mutation and it can cause cancer. According to the WHO paper, men smoke nearly five times as much as women around the world. Also, diagnosis can be a problem. In case of gender specific gene, women can have more opportunity to find it earlier because they are used to visiting obstetrics when they are pregnant.

 

         Moreover, it is also important factor that men have larger height and weight than women in average. In statistics, men’s height is about 1.08 times higher than women. In other words, it means men have more cells than women.

         So, if the mutation rate is same, cancer cell might have more chance to occur in men. Also, based on 2008-2012 deaths, cancer mortality is highest in African American men (261.5 per 100,000) who are one of tallest ethnic groups which has 178cm tall in average and lowest in Asian/Pacific Islander women (91.2 per 100,000) whose height was 158cm in average.

 

         Genetically, men have X and Y chromosome but women have both X chromosome. So, if a man have mutated gene in Y chromosome, it is directly passed to their son. If man have mutated gene in X chromosome, it is also passed to their daughter. However, it is more harmful for the first case. As seeing the NIH data, X chromosome likely contains 800 to 900 genes that give instructions for making proteins but Y chromosome likely contains 50 to 60 genes for it. Therefore, one mutated gene has more impact in Y chromosome and the probability of cancer outbreak become increase.

 

Reference

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics

http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/microbe-matters/curing_cancer_why_not_use

http://halls.md/chart/men-height-b.htm

Sara C Hitchman ^a & Geoffrey T Fong, Gender empowerment and female-to-male smoking prevalence ratios

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_human_height_worldwide

http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/chromosome/Y#resources

http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/chromosome/X