Jena University Hospital calls for greater consideration of age and gender in medicine

According to the results of a recent study by researchers at Jena University Hospital, doctors should pay more attention to the age and gender of their patients when vaccinating and administering medication.

When it comes to vaccination recommendations, for example, from his point of view it would fundamentally make sense to differentiate between men and women, said the director of the Institute for Infectious Disease Medicine and Hospital Hygiene at this clinic, Mathias Pletz, to the German Press Agency.

This could mean, for example, making a vaccination recommendation for men over the age of 50 to immunize against certain diseases, while such a recommendation for women only exists from the age of 55 or 60. “That would be beneficial for both sexes,” said Pletz. Researchers in his field were able to show in a study that the immune systems of women and men age at different rates.

Another way to respond to these differences between the sexes could be to adjust the vaccination doses, said Pletz. It has long been known in research that women often show stronger vaccination reactions than men. These included increased redness and pain at the injection site or increased fatigue as a result of such immunizations.

Both options - either adjusting the time of administration of medical substances or adjusting their dosage - also exist if patients need medication as a result of an illness, said Pletz. According to him, doctors are already well on their way to making medicine as personalized as possible when treating cancer patients. In many other areas, however, men weighing 70 kilograms are still too often assumed to be the norm patients.

“We definitely need personalized medicine for sepsis,” said Pletz. Such an illness, known colloquially as blood poisoning, often develops within hours. “We simply don’t have the time for treatments that don’t work quickly.” Sepsis is the most serious form of infection. It can arise from any infection and is almost always fatal if not treated in time.

For the university clinic's current research into the different aging of the immune systems of men and women, researchers led by Pletz used data that they collected from around 230 men and women in Neustadt am Rennsteig during the corona pandemic. The place in the Ilm district was sealed off from the outside world at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 after several infections with Sars-CoV-2 were detected there. Data was then collected there under the direction of Pletz. The current research results are a kind of byproduct of this collection.

A central finding of this research is that at least part of the immune system of men and women differs throughout life and also ages at different rates. A type of so-called T cells that is particularly important for the body's defense would decline more quickly in men than in women, said Pletz. Men are therefore more susceptible to infections as they get older and are then more likely to die from them than women.