Posted by Ueli (194.230.197.69) on October 12, 1999 at 20:23:38:
In Reply to: proportion posted by Rick H on October 12, 1999 at 15:34:21:
The reported male/female ratio for CH has steadily decreased over time.
Forty year old (and still disseminated) reports give values larger than 10 to 1 (often 5% or less female)
Two threads above Bob Johnson gives a link to emedicine.com. There the value is 5 to 1 (16%)
In the Health Report link on our link page Dr. Goadsby gives a value of 3.5 to 1 (22%)
That our survey show a few % more female sufferers than the must recent data of Dr. Goadsby may be due to the fact that male surfers tend to be more attracted to the xxxx sites than to sites about their health ;-)
In an Italian report I read, it was tried to proof a connection between the growing number of female CHeads and the general tendency of female life style to approach the male one (especially regarding smoking and drinking, of course). But for a 50 year period they only observed about 100 female CHeads. IMHO, this was a far to small sample for a credible statistics; and it was not made better by calculating all numbers to at least 2 decimal places !
I believe, the increase of the percentage of female CHeads is plain and simply due to the better diagnosis in recent years.
PFNAD's
Ueli