BoomerGirl Diary

Norfolk, Va. — Anne Tate’s son has a theory about her knees: One will walk like a cowboy, the other like a go-go dancer.

In September, Tate became something of an experiment when she had her right knee replaced with a new implant designed specifically for women.

Last year, Tate said she had her left knee done with the traditional implant that seems to fit men better than women.

“It may be all in my head but it seems like this knee bends more readily,” Tate, 77, said of her so-called “feminine knee.”

The gender-specific implant, which was approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration in the spring, is one of the latest signs that the medical community is recognizing that men and women are different in more than just the obvious ways.

Traditionally, the assumption was that if it worked for a man, it would work for a woman. Until about a decade ago, many medical research trials focused exclusively on male subjects. The results were then extrapolated to women.

Women were receiving “inferior health care simply because there was no data on women,” said Sherry Marts, vice president for scientific affairs for the Society for Women’s Health Research, a nonprofit organization in Washington.

Not recognizing gender differences can have profound health consequences. For example, the “classic” symptom of a heart attack — crushing chest pain — is really only typical of men, Marts said. Women having heart attacks are more likely to feel nauseated, extremely fatigued and short of breath — and more likely to have their symptoms misdiagnosed.

While progress has been made, there’s still a long way to go to raise awareness of sex differences, Marts said. That it’s 2006 and a knee implant designed for women — who make up about two-thirds of knee-replacement surgeries — is “new” might be a sign of that.

“I’m enthusiastic that the industry is at least acknowledging that men’s and women’s joints are shaped differently,” Marts said.