Psychosocial Phenomena and Female “Protection” from Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis in Cynomolgus Macaques (Macaca Fascicularis)

Abstract

A poorly understood aspect of the natural history of human atherosclerosis is that premenopausal females, particularly in advanced industrialized nations, have significantly less coronary heart disease and atherosclerosis than do males (1). Among Caucasians in North America, this difference is approximately twofold (1). The suggested explanations for this effect include gender differences in plasma lipids, the protective effect of estrogens (or relative lack of androgens) and a possibility that females do not experience or exhibit the competitive and sometimes hostile behavior of males and thus are spared the stress responses accompanying such behaviors (1,2,3). Female “protection” remains a mystery, in part, because of the absence of a suitable animal model for investigation of the phenomenon. Recently, we have shown that the cynomolgus macaque (Macaca fascicularis) is a good model for the investigation of gender differences in atherosclerosis (4,5).