Women With Autoimmune Conditions Are More Likely to Be Misdiagnosed and Face Delays in Diagnosis

If you’re told your symptoms are “all in your head” when something is physically wrong, it can leave you feeling dismissed and filled with self-doubt. In a new international study of adults with autoimmune diseases, researchers found that this scenario was more likely for women — an especially notable conclusion because autoimmune conditions typically occur more often in women than in men.

Investigators found that women with autoimmune diseases were more likely than men to report being told their symptoms were driven by a mental health condition or were psychosomatic (meaning caused or made worse by mental or emotional factors). Women also waited longer for the right diagnosis and saw clinicians more times along the way.

“We already knew that many autoimmune diseases can take many years to diagnose, so our most worrying and novel finding was the very high reports of these types of misdiagnoses, and the gender differences,” says the lead author, Melanie Sloan, PhD, an assistant research professor of public health and primary care at the University of Cambridge and Norwich Medical School at the University of East Anglia in England.

Those delays matter, because untreated inflammation from autoimmune disease can cause lasting damage to organs and is linked to poorer quality of life and a shorter lifespan.

Earlier research by Dr. Sloan’s team found that this kind of misdiagnosis can also have lasting effects on self-esteem, trust in doctors, and willingness to report symptoms in the future, she says.

Women Waited Longer and Were More Often Told Symptoms Were Psychological

For the new study, researchers surveyed more than 6,600 adults with autoimmune diseases, including lupus, autoimmune thyroid disease, and rheumatoid arthritis, between December 2024 and March 2025.

The information gathered included how long it took participants to receive a diagnosis, how many doctor visits were required, and whether their symptoms had been misdiagnosed. Most participants were women, and about 70 percent lived in the United Kingdom.

About 50 percent of men reported receiving their diagnosis within the first year after symptoms started, compared with 40 percent of women. Women were also more likely to report:

Having their symptoms attributed to a mental health condition (43 percent of women versus 33 percent of men)
Having their symptoms labeled psychosomatic (34 percent versus 22 percent)
Waiting four years or more for a diagnosis (32 percent versus 26 percent)
Seeing a clinician 11 or more times before diagnosis (26 percent versus 18 percent)

These gender differences in mental health and psychosomatic misdiagnoses held up after researchers accounted for age, type of disease, where people lived, and household finances. But women and men were about equally likely to report being misdiagnosed with a different physical disease.

Do the Findings Point to Medical Gaslighting?

The new findings add weight to women’s reports of being dismissed by doctors and support the idea that gender plays a role in medical gaslighting — a choice to dismiss a patient’s reported symptoms as exaggerated, mistaken, or imagined — says Devora Shapiro, PhD, an associate professor of social medicine at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine in Cleveland, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Medical gaslighting could also look like a provider suggesting that you’ve misunderstood your own body, that your symptoms are insignificant, or that the cause is not medical, but instead psychiatric or behavioral, says Dr. Shapiro, who researches medical gaslighting.

The findings of this new study stand out because autoimmune diseases are more common in women. In theory, she says, that fact should lead doctors to suspect these conditions less often in men. “And yet men waited less time for an accurate diagnosis than women, required fewer trips to the physician in order to achieve an accurate diagnosis, and were less likely to be dismissed as presenting with a psychiatric or behavioral disorder,” says Shapiro.