Faced with the main causes of illness or premature death common to both sexes, the gaps between women and men are significant, underlines a study published Thursday in The Lancet Public health.
Researchers compared years of healthy life lost for the 20 leading causes of illness or premature death among women and men aged over 10 globally and in seven world regions, between 1990 and 2021.
Overall, the loss “appears greater in men, particularly due to premature deaths, but women, although they tend to live longer, suffer more from illnesses during their life,” they summarize. the result of their modeling, which uses 2021 “Global burden disease” data.
Higher levels of illness and disability among women
Covid, cardiovascular, pulmonary pathologies, diabetes, chronic liver diseases, but also musculoskeletal disorders, road trauma, or even depressive, anxiety and Alzheimer’s disorders are among the conditions taken into account.
Overall, men were more affected in 2021 by problems leading to premature deaths, such as Covid, road accidents, cardiovascular, respiratory or liver diseases, women by musculoskeletal, mental, or neurodegenerative disorders. , according to the study.
Throughout their lives, women experience higher levels of illness and disability than men because they generally live longer. Over the past 30 years, the gender gap in the impact of these 20 pathologies has remained generally stable, but has sometimes increased, as for diabetes, which affects men even more than before, according to the study. Over this same period, alterations due to depressive disorders, anxiety and certain musculoskeletal disorders affecting women have increased significantly overall.
Differences that appear from adolescence
Another lesson: differences in health between women and men emerge from adolescence.
“The challenge now is to design, implement and evaluate methods of prevention and treatment of the main causes of morbidity and premature mortality that take sex and gender into account, from a very young age and within diverse populations” , according to the main author, Luisa Sorio Flor, of the University of Washington, cited in a press release.
The study has several limitations, its authors recognize, mentioning in particular the quantity and quality of certain data or systemic biases in epidemiological data.
