Men experience more skin infections than women — doctors have known this for a while. They have proposed both behavioural and physiological reasons for this difference but the exact mechanism has been unclear.
Recently, scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Centre in Texas in the U.S. reported that the male sex hormones, androgens, which include testosterone, help bacteria communicate and cause skin infections by activating a bacterial signalling system called quorum sensing.
Their findings, published inNature Microbiology, show that reducing testosterone levels in mouse models increased the animals’ resistance to infections. When the researchers applied testosterone topically to female mice, the infection became more severe.
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