Greatest Impact On Female Students

Mononucleosis is an equal opportunity disease, infecting our young without regard to their ethnicity, religion, or sex. But it seems that women students who get mono are missing a lot more classroom time than their male counterparts. Could this be a throwback to the idea that women are the weaker of the species?

According to researchers at the University of Edinburgh, female undergraduates with mononucleosis missed 16 hours of school on average, compared with only 3 hours for male students suffering from mono. Women also reported that their symptoms, such as severe fatigue, lasted twice as long as those of the men. Women were still exhausted 4 months after diagnosis compared to only 2 months of symptoms for the guys.

Kissing Disease

Mononucleosis, sometimes called the "kissing disease," is triggered by the Epstein-Barr virus and is passed through the saliva. The virus is most often contracted in early childhood and tends to be asymptomatic. But when the virus is caught in young adulthood, it is more usual for there to be symptoms such as fever, a long-lasting sore throat, and chronic fatigue. While patients with infectious mononucleosis (IM) will usually recover spontaneously by six months, some cases may drag on much longer.

This recent study involved 115 Edinburgh students. The participants answered questionnaires. Among the students were 57 confirmed cases of mono and the other healthy participants served as the control group.

In the ill students, the researchers discovered that for both sexes, study time, including those hours spent in and out of the classroom, had been reduced by 25 hours a week during the time of the severest symptoms.

Social Activities

Those students with mono slept 3 hours longer every day than the healthy students and cut their hours of social activities by as much as 8-10 hours a week.

By three or four weeks into their illness, study time was still cut by some 16 hours weekly.

The report on this study, which was published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, stated that for women, the consequences of the disease were much direr. "Comparison of symptoms between males and females revealed that self-reported IM-associated fatigue was significantly more common, more severe, and longer-lasting in females," said the authors." This resulted in females taking less exercise during their illness, missing more study and being more likely to discontinue their studies."

Immune System

One of the study authors, Karen MaCauly, who is affiliated with the Centre for Infectious Diseases in Edinburgh, said that no one was sure why the virus had been harder on the women. "Presumably this is down to the immune system but we really don’t know why. Further studies may be necessary to confirm the link."