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When asked to rate their own health, women, on average, consistently report being in worse health than men do, and a new study from researchers in Spain says this is because women have a higher rate of chronic diseases — contradicting a previous theory that women's lower self-rated health is simply a reporting bias."In general practice, there has been this idea that women over-report health problems, or are more likely to say they are ill or pay attention to their symptoms than men," said first author of the study Davide Malmusi, of the Public Health Agency of Barcelona. "We wanted to test whether their differences in self-reported health could in fact be explained by the difference in the prevalence of chronic conditions."The new findings were published Dec. 16 in the European Journal of Public Health.Self-reporting healthMalmusi and colleagues across Spain gathered data from Spain's 2006 National Health Survey, which included data from face-to-face interviews with more than 29,000 people on their health. About half of the study participants were between the ages of 16 and 44; the other half was older.The survey included the question, "Over the last 12 months, would you say your overall health has been very good, good, fair, poor, or very poor?" as well as a question on whether health problems had limited people's activities over the previous six months.Of the women interviewed, 38.8 percent rated their health as poor or very poor, and 25.7 percent reported chronic limitation of activity. Of the men in the study, only 27 percent had poor self-rated health, and 19.3 percent reported chronic limitation of activity.But when the researchers matched up the number of chronic conditions each person had with his or her health rating, the gender difference disappeared. Having a higher number of chronic conditions correlated with poorer self-rated health to the same degree in both genders.
