For a wide range of diseases, diagnosis comes later in life for women than for men, according to a large Danish study.
根据丹麦的一项大规模研究，对于很大部分疾病，女性的确诊时间要比男性晚好几年。
Researchers don't know whether the later diagnoses are due to genetics, the environment, possible biases in the healthcare system - or some combination of reasons.
研究者不知道这个现象（女性更晚诊断）是因为遗传、环境、卫生医疗系统的偏见，或是几者皆有。
The study of health data from 6.9 million Danish people found that across hundreds of diseases, women on average were diagnosed when they were about four years older than the age at which the conditions were recognized in men.
这项来自六百九十万丹麦人的健康数据的研究，发现有数百种疾病，女人被诊断出来的时间平均比男人晚四年。
"We're not just looking at one disease here, we're looking at all diseases and we are looking at an entire population, from cradle to grave," lead author Soren Brunak from the University of Copenhagen told Reuters Health by phone.
哥本哈根大学的索恩·布鲁纳克通过电话告诉路透社健康栏目：“我们并不只关注一种疾病，我们关注所有疾病，观察所有的人，从他们出生到死亡。”
On average, women received cancer diagnoses 2.5 years after men. They received diagnoses for metabolic diseases like diabetes 4.5 years later.
女性平均比男性平均晚2.5年被诊断出癌症。例如糖尿病等代谢性疾病，她们通常会在4.5年后才被诊断出来。
"(This) actually surprised us quite a lot," Brunak said. "Men generally have a tendency to get to the doctor later... So presumably the difference in onset is even larger."
“这实际上让我们异常惊讶”，他说，“通常来说，男性倾向于晚些就医，所以由此推测初始的差异甚至会更大。”
Brunak and his team considered incidence rates of diseases in the 18 broad categories of the ICD-10 diagnosis system managed by the World Health Organization.
布鲁纳克和他的团队考虑了世界卫生组织管理的ICD-10诊断系统18大类疾病的发病率。
The study wasn't designed to explain the causes of the differences. Another limitation is that researchers only looked at diagnoses made in hospitalized patients.
这项研究并非是要解释造成这些差异的缘由，它的另一个局限性是仅仅关注了住院确诊的病人。
Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, director of the Barbra Streisand Women's Heart Center at the Cedars-Sinai Smidt Heart Institute, who was not involved in the study, pointed out to Reuters Health that the study therefore lacks information on age at diagnosis for people who didn't require hospitalization.
没有参与这项研究的西达斯-西奈斯米特心脏研究所芭芭拉·史翠珊妇女心脏中心主任诺埃尔·拜瑞·默茨博士向路透社健康版指出，这项研究因此缺乏不需要住院治疗的患者的年龄诊断信息。
"On the other hand," she said, "being hospitalized is a sign of a serious illness, so (that) adds significance to the diagnosis and supports that disease onset may be later in women."
“另一方面，”她说，“住院表明病情比较严重，所以(这项研究)对疾病诊断有额外意义，同时也赞同女性可能会发病较晚。”
Brunak's study, published in Nature Communications, showed that the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis was a notable exception to the trend. Here, women were typically diagnosed before they suffered a fracture, while the opposite was true for men.
布鲁纳克的研究发表在《自然通讯》杂志上，该研究表明，骨质疏松症是这种趋势的一个显著例外。在这里，女性通常在骨折前就被诊断出来，而男性则恰恰相反。
"I am fascinated by this study, which generally confirms all that I present in my Stanford course on Sex and Gender in Human Physiology and Disease," said Marcia Stefanick, Director of Stanford University's Women's Health and Sex Differences in Medicine Center.
斯坦福大学女性健康与性别差异医学中心主任马西娅·斯蒂凡尼克说:“我对这项研究很感兴趣，它基本上证实了我在斯坦福大学开设的有关人类生理学和疾病中的性别与性别的课程中提出的所有观点。”