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Review
. 2021 Mar 1;49(2):122-125.
doi: 10.15586/aei.v49i2.49. eCollection 2021.

Do gender and puberty influence allergic diseases?

Cristine Secco Rosário  1 , Cristina Alves Cardozo  2 , Herberto José Chong Neto  3 , Nelson Augusto Rosário Filho  3
Affiliations
Review

Do gender and puberty influence allergic diseases?

Cristine Secco Rosário et al. Allergol Immunopathol (Madr). .

Abstract

Differences between biological sex, gender identity, and their impact on health may have significant implications for the prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment of several diseases, including allergies. Asthma, allergic rhinitis (AR), atopic dermatitis (AD), and allergic conjunctivitis (AC) have different prevalences and different risk factors in infancy. Although boys present allergies more often in childhood, it quickly changes during girls' sexual development, leading to lifelong female predominance of allergic diseases. This can be explained by the influence of sexual hormones, different lifestyles adopted by men and women, microbiota diversity, diet distinctions, professional options, and adherence to treatment, among others. Gender-related aspects should become essential parameters in allergology to diagnostic and therapeutic stratification, associated with molecular, genetic, and epigenetic patterns. Longitudinal studies would be interesting to evaluate possible mechanisms underlying these differences in prevalence. Sex- and gender-specific observations beyond 14 years of age are scarce and further allergic multimorbidity studies in different populations, especially in adults, are necessary.

Keywords: allergy; gender; puberty; rhinitis; sex.

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Conflict of interest statement

All the authors have nothing to disclose related to this article. The content of the manuscript has not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere.We confirm that this work is original and has not been published elsewhere. All authors have conceived and planned the project, as well as analyzed and interpreted the data. We all have organized and critically reviewed the manuscript’s content and approved the final content.

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