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Sex on the brain: Unraveling the differences between women and men in neurodegenerative disease

Nature Medicine volume 22, pages 1370–1372 (2016)Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 05 May 2017

This article has been updated

These are not new concerns. In 2010, the US Institute of Medicine, now known as the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies, convened a workshop on sex differences in the nervous system and what implications these differences have for translational research. The workshop cast a spotlight on the topic, which had been underappreciated, according to Rae Silver, a neurobiologist at Columbia University and co-chair of the 2010 event. She says that there is more work to be done yet: “We know some areas where sex differences have a huge impact—like research on pain and drugs of abuse—and we need to discover more of those.”

In recent years, Silver has seen changes under way. As an example, she points to the requirement of the US National Institutes of Health that preclinical research in animals—including studies of neurodegenerative diseases—include a plan to account for any sex-based differences in biology1.

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Change history

  • 18 April 2017

    In the December 2016 issue, the piece “Sex on the brain: Unraveling the differences between women and men in neurodegenerative disease” (Nat. Med. 22, 1370–1372, 2016), the explanation of the US National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) policy on sex differences in animal research is incorrect. The policy does not require that researchers include equal numbers of male and female animals, but rather that they account for sex as a biological variable in their research design. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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  1. Mike May is a freelance writer and editor living in Florida.,

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May, M. Sex on the brain: Unraveling the differences between women and men in neurodegenerative disease. Nat Med 22, 1370–1372 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1216-1370

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