Men Just As Likely to Suffer from Depression as Women, Study Finds

Depression affects men and women equally, especially when non-traditional symptoms are considered, a new study reported. The latest research accounted for different signs of depression such as risk-taking, drug abuse and aggression.

"When men are depressed they may experience symptoms that are different than what is included in current diagnostic criteria," Lisa A. Martin, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, wrote.

More than 350 million people around the world suffer from depression, according to data from World Health Organization. The agency says that women are more likely to develop depression than men. In the U.S., about one in every ten adults is depressed, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The study might offer an explanation about men's higher risk for suicide.

 "When it comes to depression in men, to some extent we have blinders on," said Dr. Andrew Leuchter, a psychiatrist who studies depression at UCLA told the Los Angeles Times. "We have not been asking about and taking into account a range of symptoms that may be gender-specific."

Data for the study came from over 5,000 men and women who were part of a mental health survey. Researchers tried to find whether gender disparities in depression rates changed when other depression symptoms were take into account.

Researchers found that men were significantly more likely to have higher rates of aggression, abuse and drug-use when compared with women. If only the alternative male-based symptoms were considered, then a higher proportion of men (26.3 percent) had depression when compared with women (21.9 percent).

When, researchers plugged in these symptoms along with the conventional ones, they found that depression affected men and women almost similarly (30.6 percent versus 33.3 percent).

"..the results of this work have the potential to bring significant advances to the field in terms of the perception and measurement of depression. These findings could lead to important changes in the way depression is conceptualized and measured," the authors concluded.

The study is published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.