Yihui Yang of the Karolinska Institutet and colleagues from Denmark, Iceland, Norway, the United States, and Sweden conducted a population-based cohort study and found that the incidence of mental disorders in men and women varies significantly by age. The analysis included all people born and living in Sweden from 2003 to 2019 (almost 4.82 million women and 4.84 million men). Using this data, they calculated age- and sex-specific standardized incidence rates for the 10 most common mental disorders, as well as incidence difference (IRD) between men and women. The article was published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe.
The total follow-up period was almost 120 million person-years. It was found that males were more likely to develop any mental disorder at the age of 5–9 years: IRD −8.93; 95% confidence interval (CI) −9.08 to −8.79 per 1000 person-years, while females were more likely to develop any mental disorder at the age of 15–19 years (IRD 9.33; 95% CI 9.12 to 9.54 per 1000 person-years) and thereafter, excluding ages 60–69 years. For specific disorders, women showed significantly higher rates of depressive, anxiety, eating, stress-related, and bipolar disorders between the ages of 10 and 54, while men had significantly higher rates of autism spectrum disorders and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder before age 14, substance use disorders between the ages of 15 and 54, and alcohol use disorders in adulthood. Schizophrenia was also higher in men between the ages of 15 and 49 and in women between the ages of 60 and 79.
