Sex and Gender Specific Medicine in Chronic Liver Diseases

Sex and gender specific medicine is one of the most important issues to be promoted in recent medical care, from the viewpoint of the establishment of evidence-based medicine for the best therapies as well as patients' quality of life and also national health economics. Medical doctors should understand and elucidate the mechanisms underlying sex or gender differences regarding the incidence or etiology, clinical features, and each natural history or response to specific therapies.

Sex or gender differences have been generally observed among various liver diseases, such as viral hepatitis, alcoholic liver disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, autoimmune hepatitis, primary biliary cirrhosis, primary sclerosing cholangitis and hepatocellular carcinoma. The mechanisms of these differences, however, are still obscure in spite of the world-wide reports, probably because there are variances in the regions, suggesting that such differences seem to exist in racial genes and cultural life style.

In this chapter, sex and gender specific medicine in the category of chronic liver diseases is reviewed by going through related original papers with personal opinions and comments.

Keywords: Hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, viral hepatitis, alcoholic liver disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, autoimmune hepatitis, primary biliary cirrhosis, primary sclerosing cholangitis, hepatocellular carcinoma, cytochrome P4502E1, IL-6