Cholesterol-lowering statins are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. They can have side effects, however, including muscle pain that affects twice as many women as men. When Karen Reue, a geneticist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), set out to discover why, she expected that the answer would lie in the sex hormones, such as oestrogen and testosterone, which are produced by the ovaries and testes. But her data pointed to a different culprit: the X chromosome. Whether they had female or male gonads, mice with two Xs were more susceptible to statin-induced side effects1. 'I was amazed when we got our results,' says Reue. 'It was just clear-cut as could be.' A single gene on the X chromosome was the main contributor to the difference in how female mice respond to the drug. Her work has even pointed to a potential way to mitigate the side effects in women. Fish oil contains a fatty acid called DHA, which is...
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