1,000+ genetic switches explain why women face higher autoimmune disease risk

For generations, medicine treated the immune system as a single instrument playing the same tune in every body, yet women have long suffered autoimmune diseases at rates that quietly defied that assumption. A team of researchers, analyzing more than 1.25 million individual immune cells from nearly a thousand participants, has now mapped over a thousand genetic switches that operate differently in female and male immunity — most of them residing not on sex chromosomes, but on the shared chromosomes that biology long considered neutral ground. The discovery suggests that women's immune systems a