Sure, we hear A LOT about man flu but actually it's us women who have the right to complain because new research has found that women tend to get ill much more often than our male counterparts.
It has been scientifically known for a while that almost 80% of people who suffer from autoimmune diseases are women, however the reason behind this wasn't as clear.
Autoimmune diseases include any illness that stems from the body's immune system mistakenly attacking healthy tissues such as Crohn's disease, arthritis and psoriasis.
However, scientists from the University of Michigan were not content for women to suffer in (relative) silence without knowing why and studied gender-specific genes to try and find out.
The study's lead author Yun Liang, PhD and his team studied 82 healthy men and women and found 'striking differences in gene expression' between the sexes. In fact they discovered 661 genes that were interpreted differently in men and women and a large proportion of them were linked to the immune system.
In their findings, published in journal Nature Immunology, they explain: 'This finding suggested that these sex-biased genes contributed to not only increased disease susceptibility but possibly also heightened disease activity.
'In this context, we note that being female is the strongest risk factor for the development of autoimmunity, and it dwarfs the identified autoimmune genetic risk variants.'
This discovery means that steps can now be taken to help refine treatment and and also prevent autoimmune diseases in the future.
In the meantime though, at least it's a good rebuttal when we're hit with: 'But, I've got man flu'.
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