Diagnosis & hEDS/HSD
Does Hypermobility Look Different in Men? Sex Differences in hEDS/HSD
None of us writing this are doctors. This page collects what the published research actually says about sex differences in how hEDS/HSD is diagnosed and how symptoms show up, so you have something concrete to bring to a doctor.
hEDS and HSD are diagnosed in far more women than men, and it's a fair question whether that reflects a real biological difference, an underdiagnosis problem in men, or some of both. A large 2026 retrospective study out of the Mayo Clinic Florida EDS Clinic is the most direct look yet at how the two groups compare.
How Skewed Is the Sex Ratio, and What Does It Mean?
The study (Wilson, Fairweather et al., 2026) reviewed self-reported data from 2,451 adult patients diagnosed with hEDS or HSD at the clinic between November 2019 and April 2025. Among the hEDS patients, 90.6% were female and 9.4% were male, a ratio of roughly 9.6 women for every man. Among the HSD patients, the skew was even sharper: 95.2% female to 4.8% male, close to 20 women for every man.
A skewed ratio like that doesn't by itself prove the underlying condition is genuinely rarer in men. The same study's other findings point toward at least part of the explanation being how symptoms present and get recognized, not just how often the underlying connective tissue difference occurs.
What Differs Between Men and Women With a Diagnosis
Looking across 122 self-reported symptoms and comorbidities, women reported more of them overall: 25.4% of the symptom list was reported significantly more often by women in the hEDS group, and 48.4% more often by women in the HSD group. Women with HSD specifically reported more mast-cell-related symptoms like hives, were more often diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and reported more symptoms consistent with autonomic dysfunction than men.
The pattern ran the other way for a specific, smaller cluster of five findings: attention deficit disorder/ADHD, delayed developmental milestones, snoring, autism spectrum disorder, and obstructive sleep apnea were all reported significantly more often by men in this dataset. That's a notable detail on its own, and it echoes research covered elsewhere on this site connecting neurodivergence to hypermobility: the overlap may be showing up more visibly in men specifically, which raises the possibility that hypermobile men are more often being diagnosed and treated through a neurodivergence pathway rather than a joint or connective tissue one, and their hypermobility itself is going unrecognized as a result.
Read more on the hub page
What to do about it
If you're a man with joint pain, frequent sprains, or other signs of hypermobility, and it hasn't been raised as a possibility, this research is a reasonable reason to ask directly, especially if you also have an ADHD or autism diagnosis, since that combination showed up more often in men in this dataset than in women. A Beighton score assessment is a quick, low-cost starting point (see our Beighton Score page).
This is one retrospective study from a single specialty clinic, based on self-report rather than independent clinical verification of every symptom. The sample is large, but it describes people who were already diagnosed and already being seen at that clinic, not the general population. Treat the specific percentages as a documented pattern worth discussing, not a precise population-wide estimate.