Kyle Sue , clinical assistant professor in family medicine Health Sciences Centre, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John’s, NL, Canada ksue{at}ualberta.ca

Kyle Sue explores whether men are wimps or just immunologically inferior

“Man flu” is a term so ubiquitous that it has been included in the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries. Oxford defines it as “a cold or similar minor ailment as experienced by a man who is regarded as exaggerating the severity of the symptoms.”1 Since about half of the world’s population is male, deeming male viral respiratory symptoms as “exaggerated” without rigorous scientific evidence, could have important implications for men, including insufficient provision of care.

Despite the universally high incidence and prevalence of viral respiratory illnesses,2 no scientific review has examined whether the term “man flu” is appropriately defined or just an ingrained pejorative term with no scientific basis. Tired of being accused of over-reacting, I searched the available evidence (box) to determine whether men really experience worse symptoms and whether this could have any evolutionary basis.

Methods I searched PubMed/MedLine, EMBASE, Cochrane, CINAHL, Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar using combinations and variants of terms “man”/“male”, “woman”/”female”, “gender”/“sex”, “influenza”/“flu”, “viral”, “respiratory”, “common cold”, “difference”, “comparison”, “intensive care.” I read the abstracts of all articles found and narrowed articles down by relevance. References in each article were then hand searched to ensure comprehensiveness.