Gender Matters in Heart Disease: Measuring the Impact of Sex and Gender on Heart Disease Risk and Outcomes -- talk by Louise Pilote

Sex and gender are distinct constructs. Sex differences in cardiovascular disease risk factors and outcome may be partly explained by patients’ gender-related characteristics. This talk will present a gender index built to analyze the association between gender, sex, and cardiovascular risk factors and outcome among patients with premature heart disease. The gender index offers a pragmatic measure of gender for biomedical health researchers.

Harvard's 2017-18 Gender and Sexuality Seminar Series - Sex/Gender: Theory into Practice - engages feminist theorists, science studies scholars, and practicing scientists in conversation about the constructs of “sex” and “gender” in biological and health science research, highlighting the work of researchers who devise innovative ways to analyze gender in intersectional biomedical research.

 A  pre-seminar reading group will meet a week before each speaker. For details and readings, or with other questions, please email wgssymposia@fas.harvard.edu.

Louise Pilote is Professor of Medicine and James McGill chair at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.  She is internationally recognized for her work on sex and gender differences in cardiovascular diseases.  She has shown that gender, independently of  patient sex, is an important determinant of the acquisition of cardiac risk factors and of the health consequences of  a heart attack.

Part of the Sex/Gender: Theory into Practice Seminar Series. Future series events:

March 29, 2018 – Anne Fausto-Sterling (Brown) Gender-in-the-body: Infant-Mother Motor Interactions during Months 3-12 of Infancy

April 19, 2018 – Sari van Anders (University of Michigan) Gender/Sex, Social Neuroendocrinology, and Feminist/Queer Science