
Sex & Gender and TBI
This section provides some information on brain injury in women. Men are more likely to experience brain injury overall and as such much research has focused on men and not exclusively on women. While there is a growing amount of research that has identified that girls/women may experience brain injury differently, we are still in the very early stages of trying to understand how brain injury may affect men and women differently and the research is not always consistent.
In research on concussion, it has been found that girls/women have on average a longer recovery time and may experience more severe symptoms.1 Girls/women were also found to have more neck injuries with their concussions than boys/men during the reproductive years.2 They are also more likely to experience challenges maintaining mental health that may put them at risk of a longer recovery time.3
It has also been found that menstrual cycle changes are not uncommon after a brain injury which could be due to the injury to the brain or other challenges that may occur along with the brain injury.1 Research has also identified that after a brain injury, women may have fewer births and more postpartum problems than women without a brain injury.4 Brain Injury may be affected by physiological factors such as different hormones, pain receptors, and brain structure. For instance, it has been found that females have nerve fibres in the brain which are more likely to break than those in male brains.5 Also, females have weaker neck muscles which make it harder for them to withstand a blow to the head.
As well as physiological, there are social/societal factors that may explain why women and men experience brain injury differently. For instance, women have reported not being believed by health care providers with respect to their symptoms which could be because the injury may look different among girls/women.6 7 Also, while women may be more likely to seek care for health problems under other circumstances,8 in the case of intimate partner violence, many women do not seek care for their brain injury when it occurs for a variety of reasons. They may not realize it could have happened, they may not be able to go to the hospital or their doctor, or they may not feel safe disclosing the violence at all.9 10
Some of these issues are explained in the video below. More information can also be found at the Public Health Agency of Canada's website, Applying GBA+ to Concussion Prevention and Treatment.
The Role of Sex and Gender in Traumatic Brain Injury
The Role of Sex and Gender in Traumatic Brain Injury