Yihui Yang from the Karolinska Institutet and colleagues from Denmark, Iceland, Norway, the USA and Sweden conducted a population-based cohort study and found that the incidence of mental disorders in men and women varies greatly depending on 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 sex- and age-specific standardized incidence rates of the 10 most common mental disorders, as well as the differences (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 turned out that males were more likely to develop any mental disorder at the age of 5–9 years: IRD −8.93; 95% confidence interval (CI) from −9.08 to −8.79 per 1000 person-years, and females at the age of 15–19 years (IRD 9.33; 95% CI 9.12–9.54 per 1000 person-years) and thereafter, except for the age of 60–69 years. For individual disorders, women had significantly higher rates of depressive, anxiety, eating, stress-related, and bipolar disorders at ages 10–54, and men had higher rates of autism spectrum disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at ages 0–14, substance use disorders at ages 15–54, and alcohol use disorders in adulthood. Schizophrenia was higher in men at ages 15–49 and in women at ages 60–79.