Sex Differences in the Prevalence and Detection of Depressive and Anxiety Disorders in General Health Care Settings

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Abstract
A FEMALE preponderance of depressive disorders has been a consistent observation in community care surveys.1,2 The female-male ratio for current depression calculated from reported rates in the community often falls between 1.3 and 2.8.3- 11 The female-male ratio for anxiety disorders calculated from published community rates varies from 0.7 in Canberra, Australia,4 to 4.5 in London, England,5 and 4.8 in Santander, Spain.7 Studies in primary care settings have seldom reported prevalence by sex for individual disorders, but when this has been done, prevalence rates were higher in women than in men for all categories of depressive disorder, whereas rates of anxiety were lower in women than in men.12 Previous studies have reported on the detection by primary care physicians of depressive and anxiety disorders in men and women.13- 15

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