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Sex bias of females in survival from cancer and infections. Is X the answer?

British Journal of Cancer volume 124, pages 1184–1186 (2021)Cite this article

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Summary

Major differences in survival of men and women from infectious diseases and cancers have been highlighted by death rates from COVID-19 infections. In cancer, attention has been focussed on differences in gene expression from X chromosomes in men and women with a preponderance of genes involved in immune responses being expressed in women. Important findings have been that some of the genes are important epigenetic regulators that play fundamental roles in immune responses.

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Fig. 1: Proposed model of sex-biased role of the X-linked KDM6A gene in promoting immunity.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the researchers involved in making their data publicly available in TCGA and in the analysis of COVID-19 severity.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Melanoma Oncology and Immunology Program, The Centenary Institute, University of Sydney, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Missenden Road, Camperdown, NSW, 2050, Australia

    Abdullah Al Emran, Stuart J. Gallagher, Jessamy C. Tiffen & Peter Hersey

Authors
  1. Abdullah Al Emran
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  2. Stuart J. Gallagher
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  3. Jessamy C. Tiffen
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  4. Peter Hersey
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Contributions

Conceptualisation—A.A.E., J.C.T. and P.H.; data curation—A.A.E. and S.J.G.; writing, review and editing—P.H., A.A.E. and J.C.T.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Hersey.

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Written informed consent of all participants in the TCGA was obtained by the TCGA research network. Ethical approval for the studies on COVID-19 patients was obtained from the Albany Medical College Committee on research as referred to in by Overmyer et al.15 All the studies were performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Data availability

All sources of the publicly available data used in the study are quoted in the commentary.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Funding information

This work was funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) programme grant-633004 and Cancer Council NSW grant-RG-19-05.

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Emran, A.A., Gallagher, S.J., Tiffen, J.C. et al. Sex bias of females in survival from cancer and infections. Is X the answer?. Br J Cancer 124, 1184–1186 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-020-01245-1

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