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• Posted May 5, 2025

Men Worse Off Than Women For 20 Top Health Problems Worldwide

MONDAY, May 5, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Men are much more likely than women to die early from the world’s 20 leading health problems, a new global study shows.

Sickness and death was higher in men than women in 2021 for 13 of the top 20 causes of injury and illness, including COVID-19, traffic injuries, heart problems, lung ailments and liver diseases, researchers reported May 1 in The Lancet Public Health.

“Our findings shine a light on the significant and unique health challenges faced by males,” co-lead investigator Vedavati Patwardhan, a research scientist with the University of California-San Diego, said in a news release.

“Among these challenges are conditions that lead to premature deaths, notably in the form of road injuries, cancers, and heart disease,” Patwardhan continued. “We need national health plans and strategies to address the health needs of men throughout their lives, including interventions targeting behavioral risks such as alcohol use and smoking that typically begin at a young age.”

Women tend to live longer, but they endure higher levels of illness during their lifespan, researchers added. 

Muscle and bone conditions, mental health problems and headaches are among the non-fatal diseases that plague women, results show.

For the study, researchers analyzed data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021, the largest and most comprehensive effort to track illness and death from disease around the world.

The effort focused on health differences between conditions that affect both men and women, excluding gender-specific illnesses like ovarian or prostate cancers.

Results showed that men experienced 45% more illness and death from COVID-19 than women, with the largest differences seen in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, researchers said.

“The timing is right for this study and call to action—not only because of where the evidence is now, but because COVID-19 has starkly reminded us that sex differences can profoundly impact health outcomes,” senior researcher Luisa Sorio Flor, an assistant professor with the Institute for Health Metrics (IHME) and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release.

Heart disease had the next largest impact on male health compared to females, with men experiencing 45% more illness and death compared to women.

Men experienced the greatest heart-related burden in Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where they were 49% more likely to be sick or die from heart disease.

Conditions that affect men more than women tend to involve smaller increased risks at younger ages, but the gap widens as people grow older, researchers found.

The exception was road injuries, which disproportionately affected young males aged 10 to 24 around the world.

Low back pain was the biggest contributor to illness among women, with females suffering rates more than a third higher than men in 2021, researchers said. Women in high-income countries, Latin America and the Caribbean were particularly affected.

Unlike men, women tended to start early in life suffering from conditions that affect them more, and those conditions intensify with age.

“Large causes of health loss in women, particularly musculoskeletal disorders and mental health conditions, have not received the attention that they deserve,” co-lead researcher Gabriela Gil, a research fellow with IHME, said in a news release. “It’s clear that women's healthcare needs to extend well beyond areas that health systems and research funding have prioritized to date, such as sexual and reproductive concerns.”

These results dovetail with another study published May 1 in PLOS Medicine which found that men are more likely than women to die from high blood pressure, diabetes and HIV/AIDS, typically because they shrug off medical care.

The new study highlights “how females and males differ in many biological and social factors that fluctuate and, sometimes, accumulate over time, resulting in them experiencing health and disease differently at each stage of life and across world regions,” Flor said.

“The challenge now is to design, implement, and evaluate sex- and gender-informed ways of preventing and treating the major causes of morbidity and premature mortality from an early age and across diverse populations,” Flor concluded.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on the gender gap in health.

SOURCE: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, news release, May 1, 2025