1 in 3 women with an autoimmune disease said a doctor had blamed their symptoms on their mind, and for some diseases it was more than half
Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases often start with symptoms that are easy to dismiss: tiredness, aching muscles, a rash that comes and goes. Researchers at the University of Cambridge asked 6,607 people with these diseases, in countries around the world, what happened when they first went to a doctor. Many had been told something other than the truth. Who heard it most depended on whether they were a man or a woman.
Women were much more likely to say their symptoms had first been blamed on their mind. One in three women, 33.9%, said a doctor had put their symptoms down to psychosomatic causes, compared with 21.5% of men. And 43.3% of women said their symptoms had been attributed to a mental health condition such as anxiety or depression, compared with 32.7% of men.
Women also waited longer. The most common gap between first symptoms and diagnosis for men was under three months. For women it was one to two years. Nearly a third of women, 31.8%, waited four years or more, compared with about a quarter of men.
The gap appeared only for explanations involving the mind. Men were slightly more likely than women to report being misdiagnosed with a different physical disease, though that difference was not statistically significant. When it came to autoimmune misdiagnosis as stress or anxiety, women were singled out.
“Our findings highlight that psychological or mental health explanations can be given too soon,” lead author Melanie Sloan of the University of Cambridge said in a statement. “This is true for both sexes, but our study suggests that females may be particularly vulnerable to these types of misdiagnoses.”
The second finding is about which diseases are hardest to see. People with autoimmune encephalitis, which inflames the brain, and with undifferentiated connective tissue disease, a condition with mixed symptoms that do not fit a single label, had the highest rates. More than half of them said their symptoms had been put down to mental health or psychosomatic causes. Diseases with visible signs or clear blood markers had much lower rates.
That pattern makes sense of the problem. Autoimmune diseases are far more common in women, many start with vague symptoms, and several were historically treated as psychological before doctors understood them. The researchers argue that this mix leaves women especially exposed to being sent away with the wrong explanation.
The difference held up after the team accounted for age, the type of disease, the continent people lived on and their household finances. Women still had higher odds of reporting both kinds of misdiagnosis.
If you have symptoms that keep coming back and a first explanation does not fit, it is reasonable to ask for a second opinion, a referral to a specialist, or specific blood tests. Keeping a written record of symptoms, with dates and photos of anything visible such as rashes or swelling, can make vague complaints easier for a doctor to take seriously. Women’s health has a long record of being studied less, from which form of hormone therapy is safest to what postpartum depression means for the heart.
There are limits to what this shows. The study relied on what patients remembered and believed about their diagnosis, not on medical records, so it measures perceived misdiagnosis. People who volunteer for such surveys may be more likely to have had a bad experience.
The sample was 91% female and 88% White, so the comparison rests on a much smaller group of men, and some diseases had too few men to compare at all. Women in the study also reported more other diagnoses, such as anxiety, and the researchers note this could partly explain the gap.
Source
Sloan M, Taylor S, Cox B, Naidu K, et al. “Sex and disease differences in patients’ diagnostic experiences in autoimmune diseases: an international cross-sectional study.” eClinicalMedicine, 2026.
DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2026.104259
