Gender Differences in Functional Movement Disorder: Sociocultural or Biological?

Reply: A call for caution: ‘stop that’ sentiments threaten tic research, healthcare and advocacy progress

“… 21 While in FMD—at least in younger patients—a female predominance is well documented, 22 underlying mechanisms are unclear and both biological as well as sociocultural factors have been discussed. 23 We cannot see in the least that our article ‘echoes historical pattern….. attributed to hysteria’ by simply describing clinical characteristics. So far, we analysed data of 32 patients with functional ‘Tourette-like’ behaviour and—in contrast to recent publications reporting a sex ratio of about 9:1 (female:male) 1 , 4 , 7 —we found an equal distribution with no clinical differences in functional ‘Tourette-like’ behaviour between females and males (unpublished data).…”

Functional Movement Disorders in Children

“…Most of the studies showed a higher prevalence of FMDs among girls as compared to boys with a ratio of 3–4:1 which is similar to the adult data ( 4 , 6 ). The exact mechanism of this sex predilection of FMDs is still not known because of the complex interaction of social, cultural, and biological factors ( 8 , 9 ). FMDs in children tend to have abrupt onset as compared to adults and account for 4–23% of the acute movement disorders ( 5 , 10 , 11 ).…”

Research Letter: Functional neurological disorder in transgender people: A case series

“…Though no longer considered an exclusively female malady, women are at least twice as likely to develop FND (Morsy et al., 2021). The reasons behind this are unknown, with biological, cultural and social explanations suggested (Chouksey and Pandey, 2020). If FND occurs in the transgender population, it may offer an opportunity to explore the contributions of sex and gender to the aetiology of FND.…”