The evolution of sex differences in disease genetics

There are significant differences in the biology of males and females, ranging from biochemical pathways to behavioural responses, which are relevant to modern medicine. Broad-sense heritability estimates differ between the sexes for many common medical disorders, indicating that genetic architecture can be sex-dependent. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have successfully identified sex-specific and sex-biased effects, where in addition to sex-specific effects on gene expression, twenty-two medical traits have sex-specific or sex-biased loci. Sex-specific genetic architecture of complex traits is also extensively documented in model organisms using genome-wide linkage or associa