A Chinese group claims to explain partially why males infected with hepatitis B virus have more serious clinical outcomes than females. They find in a mouse model of hepatitis B infection (mice with the HBV genome inserted into their genome) that different forms of apolipoprotein A-I are present in livers of males but not females, and they confirm this using serum from human patients who have chronic hepatitis B. The human data are in figures 5 and 6.

I remain unconvinced. In mice they said downregulation of isoform 2 and upregulation of isoform 3 was found. In human males, isoform 2 is down (p=.024) and 3 is up a little (p=.002). In females, 2 is down (p=.021) and 3 is insignificantly down (p=.057). But the expression of 3 is a lot less than 2 to begin with. Can you discern a pattern from this? I don't think the data supports the conclusion that in females, the Apo A-I isoform pattern is undisturbed. I don't think this study is conclusive by any means, so it doesn't really deserve the minor media hoopla. Science news tends to skew results all the time.