Wanted: Women’s brains — to jump-start lagging research on female concussions

There’s something wrong with the brain banks created to study the dangers of repeated trauma to the head: Almost all the brains donated so far belonged to men.

Evidence is building that the response to traumatic injury is different enough in females that they might benefit from gender-specific treatment, as they do with cardiac disease. But the data to create such guidelines simply aren’t there.

Many studies show the female brain does appear to react differently when concussed. Female rats behave differently than males, and there are biological differences, too—females have cycling hormones, higher rates of blood flow through their brains, less myelin sheathing around nerve fibers, and more migraine headaches. All those factors might affect concussion response.

Read the full article in STAT.