Individual differences |
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The majority of bulimic patients are young females from 10 to 25 years old, although the disorder can occur in people of all ages and both sexes.
There can be a popular assumption that eating disorders are ‘female diseases’, but the illnesses do not discriminate based on gender, and males can also suffer from them: “even if only 5% of sufferers are male, hundreds of thousands of young men are affected…Studies have been conducted within the homosexual subculture, and have also focused on males who suffer from anorexia and bulimia. These point to a direct connection between gender identity conflict and eating disorder in males but not in females." This does not indicate that only gender-conflicted males suffer from eating disorders, but there is "a tendency for eating disorders in males to go unrecognised or undiagnosed, due to reluctance among males to seek treatment for these stereotypically female conditions."