Are men more likely to develop autoimmune disease?

Women are up to four times more likely to suffer from autoimmune diseases compared to men. Many explanations have been proposed, including sex hormones, the X chromosome, microchimerism, environmental factors, and the microbiome. However, the mechanism of this autoimmune sexual bias remains unclear. Approximately 23.5 million Americans are living with some type of autoimmune disease.

Women are slightly more likely to develop autoimmune diseases, but this condition is no less serious in men. Understanding what autoimmune diseases are like and how to treat them will go a long way in controlling your long-term health. When Rhonda Voskuhl was a postdoctoral fellow at the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the mid-1990s, doctors knew that multiple sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune disease affecting the brain and spinal cord, was approximately twice as common in women as in men.