Anorexia is 10 times as common in women as in men, and a new study suggests that female sex hormones in the womb may play a part.
Researchers used the Swedish twin registry to study 4,226 pairs of female twins, 3,451 pairs of male twins and 4,478 pairs of opposite-sex twins, all born from 1935 to 1958. They found 51 cases of anorexia among the female twins, 3 among the male twins and 36 among the opposite-sex pairs. As expected, the risk of anorexia in female twins was higher than in male twins. But in the opposite-sex twins, 16 anorexia cases, almost half, were in males. In other words, the male member of a male-female twin pair had a risk for anorexia statistically no different from the risk among females.
New York Times
