Sexual dimorphism in the incidence of human cancers

Daoshan Zheng†,
Justyna Trynda†,
Cecilia Williams,
Jeremy A. Vold,
Justin H. Nguyen,
Denise M. Harnois,
Sanjay P. Bagaria,
Sarah A. McLaughlin and
Zhaoyu LiEmail author View ORCID ID profile

†Contributed equally

BMC Cancer201919:684

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12885-019-5902-z

Received: 30 September 2018
Accepted: 2 July 2019
Published: 12 July 2019

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Abstract

Background

Sex differences in the incidences of cancers become a critical issue in both cancer research and the development of precision medicine. However, details in these differences have not been well reported. We provide a comprehensive analysis of sexual dimorphism in human cancers.

Methods

We analyzed four sets of cancer incidence data from the SEER (USA, 1975–2015), from the Cancer Registry at Mayo Clinic (1970–2015), from Sweden (1970–2015), and from the World Cancer Report in 2012.

Results

We found that all human cancers had statistically significant sexual dimorphism with male dominance in the United States and mostly significant in the Mayo Clinic, Sweden, and the world data, except for thyroid cancer, which is female-dominant.

Conclusions

Sexual dimorphism is a clear but mostly neglected phenotype for most human cancers regarding the clinical practice of cancer. We expect that our study will facilitate the mechanistic studies of sexual dimorphism in human cancers. We believe that fully addressing the mechanisms of sexual dimorphism in human cancers will greatly benefit current development of individualized precision medicine beginning from the sex-specific diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.