Older women heal bone fractures slower than men. Now a team has found that a single, localized delivery of estrogen to a fracture can speed up healing in postmenopausal mice. The findings could have implications for the way fractures in women are treated in the future.
Over 250,000 hip fractures occur each year in adults aged 65 or older in the U.S., three-quarters of which are female. Within a year, between 15 and 36% of hip fracture patients will die. While staggering, the gender gap is unsurprising given that more women than men suffer from osteoporosis, a disease that weakens the bones. And yet, only recently has the scientific community shifted their focus to understanding this difference.
“The majority of stem cell research is done on male animals. There’s very little research that has actually been done on females,” said Wu Tsai Alliance member Charles Chan, Ph.D., an assistant professor of surgery at Stanford University and co-senior author of the paper published Oct. 30 in Nature Communications. “The research is long overdue, especially the question of why women heal differently from men.”
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