GENDER AND BDD ACROSS THE LIFE SPAN BDD AND GENDER
July 17th, 2011Is BDD more common in women or men? Is it different in the two sexes? We don’t have definite answers to these questions, but what we do know is intriguing.It’s often assumed that BDD is much more common in women. Aren’t women more focused on their looks than men are? And doesn’t society place a particularly high premium on attractiveness in women? Indeed, research findings from the general population indicate that more women than men are unhappy with how they look.Several studies of BDD have contained more women than men. Several others, however, have had as many men as women or even more men than women. Somewhat more women than men (60% vs 40%) have participated in my BDD studies. It’s unclear to what extent this ratio reflects the true gender ratio of BDD in the community. It may be harder for men to acknowledge that they have BDD, and men seem less likely than women to participate in BDD studies, especially treatment studies. Thus, the gender ratio may be more equal than these percentages suggest.In a study done in France of more than 600 patients with obsessive compulsive disorder and similar disorders (e.g., trichotillomania), men and women were nearly equally represented among the 151 patients with BDD. A number of years ago, I reviewed all the published cases of BDD that I could find in the English-language literature as well as a large number published in other languages. In these published cases, the sex ratio was approximately 1.25 female to 1.0 male.These research findings can’t give us as valid an estimate of BDD’s sex ratio as we’d like. What’s needed to determine it with greater certainty are large-scale surveys, in which the prevalence and sex ratio of BDD are determined in thousands of people in various settings, including the community. The studies I just noted were relatively small and could have various biases. In the meantime, until such surveys are done, we can be certain that BDD affects both women and men.*147\204\8*
