Men, you need to be strong now: According to the study, there is no such thing as a “male flu”.

Men do not have worse symptoms than women when they have the flu. Researchers from Austria have published a new study in the journal “Journal of Psychosomatic Research”, according to which “the concept of ‘man cold’ should be discarded”.

“Despite the widespread recognition of ‘man cold’ in mainstream pop culture, empirical data on gender differences are sparse.”write the scientists around David Riedl from the University Clinic for Psychiatry II and Daniel Dejaco from the University Clinic for Ear, Nose and Throat Medicine at the Medical University of Innsbruck.

In their study, the researchers therefore observed the course of symptoms in 113 people with flu-like symptoms within the first eight days after infection. Found the study «no significant sex-specific difference» between men and women in objective symptoms at the onset of the disease, such as nasal congestion, headache, chills or sleep deprivation.

However, there was “a significantly faster recovery in women” – both in the severity of the symptoms assessed by the physician and in the severity of the symptoms reported by the patients. The researchers cite the interaction of sex hormones with the immune system as a possible reason for this. Previous studies have shown that women are better able to produce antibodies, which increases immune activity and thus a faster and more effective defense against infections.

The study authors also point to the established fact that men are more likely to receive more thorough testing and treatment than women with the same severity of symptoms. A 2019 study in Denmark shows that almost three out of four diseases are diagnosed later in women than in men.

The scientists cite a possible gender-specific bias as a possible limitation to their study results, because it is not recorded whether a doctor recorded the symptoms and this could make a difference in their assessment. In any case, the study data “would not support the hypothesis of a ‘man cold'”.

(saw/sda/apa)