The project is titled: “Beyond the binary categorization of biological sex: redefining sexual differences in schizophrenia and their neurobiological correlates”
The research is led by Dr. Mar Fatjó-Vilas Mestre and Noemí Hostalet Chavarría as principal investigators. The scientific team is completed by Maria Giralt López, Mónica Moreira Martínez, Carmen Almodóvar Payá, and Mariona Latorre Guardia.
This is a collaborative project between FIDMAG and Fundación Hospitalarias, in partnership with the Psychiatry Department of the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital.
The team will work with two case-control samples: one already collected by the FIDMAG Research Foundation G15-CIBERSAM and another from the UK Biobank. In addition, publicly accessible transcriptomic data from various human brain atlases will be used.
A new perspective in schizophrenia research
The project starts from a clear premise: biological sex is a key factor in the health–disease continuum, but its variability has often been understudied, leading to biases in the understanding of many illnesses, including mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
The study proposes to move beyond the traditional binary “male-female” framework through an innovative approach: the development of sex-scores, or quantitative measures of biological sex, based on various brain, anthropometric, and metabolic traits.
The goal is to analyze the relationship between these sex-scores and the clinical variability observed in individuals with schizophrenia, and to investigate the underlying biological mechanisms through genomic and transcriptomic data analysis.
Impact and applicability
This new way of understanding biological sex will provide valuable knowledge not only in the field of mental health, but also in other areas of precision medicine, helping to better identify the biological mechanisms of disorders and to design more tailored treatments.
![isciii[1]](https://fidmag.org/en/img/0-60-ESCALA/isciii1.png "isciii[1]")
