Many women who have battled a cold or flu themselves this winter have also had to stand by their man as he has succumbed to the dreaded ‘man flu’.
Don’t know what man flu is? According to men’s health writer and resident man flu expert Andrew Cate, “what some women may perceive as a common cold, many men may also perceive as a crippling and debilitating disorder requiring urgent TLC. This is sometimes referred to as man flu, and it implies that men tend to exaggerate the symptoms of a cold or flu. However, because women cannot experience man flu, they will never know the true suffering involved.”
Read more about this curious, gender-specific illness here.
But new research would appear to be on the man’s side after all, suggesting that men may actually be more susceptible to the common cold than their female counterparts.
In a study published in Respiratory Research, researchers from the Queensland University School of Medicine aimed to investigate whether or not the immune response to rhinovirus (RV) varies with age or sex. RV is one of the most commonly implicated causes of the common cold and is a key trigger in acute episodes of asthma.
Researchers investigated the response of immune cells in 63 healthy individuals grouped by sex and age- under 50 and over 52 years of age. Both the innate and adaptive immune response to RV were measured.
Want to know more about how the immune system works? Read our article on immune system basics.
The researchers found that in healthy, pre-menopausal women, the adaptive immune response was stronger than in age matched men.
So next time your man complains of the dreaded ‘man flu’, go easy on him – there may in fact be some evidence behind his suffering, after all.
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