RESEARCH from the University of Queensland has found that the livers of men diagnosed with hepatic diseases change sex as part of a potential self-protective mechanism.
The discovery was made during an investigation into why disruption of the body's circadian clock is associated with obesity, type 2 diabetes and liver diseases.
"When a high-fat diet was fed to mice that had their circadian clock gene turned off, we expected them to develop diabetes or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) like the control mice, but they didn't," the researchers said.
"We also found that the liver of the obese male mice had been feminised probably due in part to the protective nature of the female sex hormone, oestrogen.
"The more advanced the disease, the more feminisation we saw in the liver tissue."
Like reproductive organs, the liver is sexually dimorphic, which means there are significant differences between the metabolic function of male and female livers.
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