The amount by which women with autoimmune diseases (which include rheumatoid arthritis, Chron’s disease, type one diabetes, and multiple sclerosis) outnumber men with the conditions is staggering. Almost 80% of sufferers are female, Scientific American says.
Scientists think this might be the case for a few reasons.
Stanford scientists say that two X chromosomes lead to groups of autoantibodies that XY chromosomes don’t make.
But because we’ve used men’s cells as the baseline for so long, “All of a female patient’s anti-Xist-complex antibodies – a huge source of women’s autoimmune susceptibility – go unseen,” they say.
Some experts, including those all over my TikTok page, think that the issue could be caused by women’s repressed rage too.
How would repressed rage make you more liable to autoimmune conditions?
Physician and trauma writer Dr Gabor Maté argued on Mel Robbins’ podcast that people with chronic conditions “had four significant characteristics.”
“They tended to put other peoples’ emotional needs ahead of their own... they tended to identify with duty, role, and responsibility... they tended to be very nice which means they repressed healthy anger... and these people tended to believe that they’re responsible for how other people feel.”
In his book, The Myth Of Normal, Maté says that the expectation of women to control their feelings “Is among the medically overlooked but pernicious ways in which our society’s ‘normal’ imposes a major health cost on women.”
That’s just a theory. However, some research suggests it may have merit.
What does the research say about women, suppressed rage, and autoimmune disease?
A 2022 paper found that women of colour who strongly identified with the sentence, “I rarely express my anger to those close to me” were 70% more likely to have carotid atherosclerosis.