Women are sick more often than men, but they often outlive them

Women are more easily diagnosed with mental disorders, this is one of the results of research into 20 diseases and differences between the sexes. Biological sex, society, and doctors influence differences in diagnosis and treatment

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Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

Women suffer more often from back pain, depression and headaches. Men, on the other hand, live shorter lives because they are more often killed in traffic accidents and more often suffer from cardiovascular diseases. And during the coronavirus pandemic, men were the first to be targeted.

These are the results of a scientific study published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet Public Health. The researchers analyzed the differences between the sexes on the example of the 20 leading causes of disease and death, at all ages and in all parts of the world.

"During life, women spend more time in poor health, while men suffer from conditions that will kill them earlier," Luiza Sorio Flor, one of the authors of the study, told DW.

Most of the differences between the sexes appear in adolescence. It is not only the time when biological differences begin to affect people's lives, but also when the sense of gender - regardless of biological sex, begins to affect life, the researchers write in their paper.

"It's not just about the biological body you're born into. It's about the gender experience of the environment you live in, which contributes to those measured differences," Professor Sarah Hawkes from University College London, who was not involved in the study, explains to DW.

And doctors are sexists

And the causes are numerous: these are not only physiological differences or customs in society. Doctors are also partly to blame.

"We know that there is already a bias in health diagnoses, when women are diagnosed with a mental disorder much faster," says one of the authors of the study, Luiza Sorio Flor from the American Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). .

At the same time, even if they complain of mental disorders, men will be less likely to be referred for therapy, also because of the prejudice that "men" do not need it. This is why statistics show that more women suffer from mental disorders.

"Back pain" is a little more difficult to explain. Physiological reasons such as greater sensitivity to pain due to hormonal fluctuations, differences in the shape of the skeleton, as well as physical stress during pregnancy and childbirth certainly play a role.

But there are other studies that testify that doctors often just wave their hands when a woman complains of back pain. This, as it turned out, is done by both male and female doctors, although more detailed research has shown that women's lower backs are in a much worse condition than men's, who will quickly be referred for therapy.

The authors of the research believe that even the women themselves do not seek medical help in this case, because they are too busy with their workplace, and there is also housekeeping and family care.

"Women's diseases" are not so important

Luiza Sorio Flor and her colleagues compared research data from 1990 and 2021, and in those thirty years they found something interesting:

"In several categories, fewer cases of the disease can be observed, but the difference between men and women remains stable."

Conditions that disproportionately affect women, such as low back pain or depression, have shown far less or almost no reduction since 1990 compared to conditions that affect men more.

The London professor believes that sexism really exists - but in the entire health system:

"I think there is a tendency within global health systems to equate women's health with their reproductive capacity. So women's health is always about what's going on with their uterus," says Hawks.

The researchers who published the work announce that they will try to get more, better quality data, but their growing problem is political correctness.

Namely, more and more often, the sex of the patient is not recorded in the diagnoses, and especially not the gender orientation. This was also seen during the coronavirus pandemic: if there were better data on the sex of the patients, perhaps some conclusions about better therapy could be drawn from that.

But for Luisa Sorio Flor, this research revealed a banal fact above all: "Our results are quite clear. The health needs of men and women are simply different." And this should be a lesson for state health care systems: for "men's" diseases such as heart attack, large funds are allocated in all hospitals. But when it comes to "women's" diseases, even when it's mental health, savings are regularly made and costs are reduced.

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