Is The Meaning of Symptoms the Same in Women And Men?

Abstract

The author hypothesize that patient gender could have an effect on expression and communication of symptoms. Symptoms may be defined as “any subjective evidence of a health problem as perceived by the patient”. Symptoms are the result of an interpretation process. Symptom experiences are embedded in a complex interplay between biological, psychological and cultural factors. The expression of symptoms depends more on psychosocial aspects than biological. In consequence there must be a variety of interpretations of sensations, which are not equivalent to expressions of underlying disease. Moreover, this interpretation of sensations, being fundamentally of a psychosocial character, must be different according to the gender of the patient. So, symptoms of the same disease could differ between women and men, and the same symptom could have different meanings in females and males. If diagnosis of disease is based exclusively on the presence of specific symptom characteristics, we may risk not take into account the different meanings by reason of gender, and give rise to misinterpretations and misdiagnoses. The implications of this perspective are immense. There is a need for developing research designs that test alternative conceptions of symptoms as a complexity phenomenon, with gender/sex differences in health, more rigorously.