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GENDER HEPATOLOGY

Working Group Coordinator
Erica Villa (Modena)

Erica Villa (clinical issues)
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Department of Internal Medicine
Gastroenterology Unit
Via del Pozzo, 71
41100 Modena, Italy
e-mail: erica.villa@unimore.it, erica.villa@gmail.com
Web: http://www.gastroenterologia.unimo.it/

Purpose:
Gender medicine is recently getting higher attention in the medical and scientific field; expression of this is the presence of journal specifically devoted to this issue and the launching of new ones. There are medical fields that are recognized since long to be gender-sensitive: obviously gynecology but also cardiology, endocrinology, nephrology. Hepatology, instead, has been much less considered under this viewpoint despite the fact that there are strong gender-dependent differences in epidemiology, pathogenesis and response to therapy in almost all liver diseases. For this strong gender-related differences some is known but much less is still under debate and deserve attention at the level of basic and applied research. The competences required are manifold as the overall picture is certainly a complex one as the relationship between disease and gender is sometimes direct and sometimes inverse (e.g. in autoimmune disease, the relationship with female gender is unfavorable while in liver cancer or in viral hepatitis is the opposite). The primary goals that the Group wants to face are therefore:

  1. study the etio-pathogenetic differences in onset and in development of liver diseases under the gender viewpoint at basic and translational level;
  2. evaluate the implications of gender viewpoint in liver disease at social and pharmaco-economic level
  3. investigate the access to the resources of the healthcare systems in hepatology (especially for expensive and restricted options like liver transplant) under the gender viewpoint.

Members of the gender hepatology working group:

  • Erica Villa, Hepatology – Coordinator, Modena
  • Tindara Addabbo, Antonella Picchio, Economy, Modena
  • Anna Bianchi, IRB, Modena
  • Patrizia Burra Transplant Hepatology, Padova
  • Kyong-Me Chang, Immunology, Philadelphia, US
  • Patricia K. Eagon, Hepatology, Pittsburgh, US
  • Maurizia Brunetto Virology, Hepatology, Pisa
  • Gloria Taliani, Infective Diseases, Rome
  • Paola Rucci, Statistics, Bologna