Man flu: an enigma wrapped in a damp towel

I'm not sure that research focusing on the preoptic nucleus will settle things – it's really a matter for the psychology of illness

It's a truth universally acknowledged that men are pathetic. Around this time of year, the man in your life will get the merest sniffle and retire to bed until the middle of next month. He'll take all the toilet rolls, the box set of Game of Thrones and a punchably pitiful look that says, like some Vietnam vet, "You weren't there, man. You wouldn't understand." He'll also take his mobile phone, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.

Meanwhile, you will continue heroically multitasking even though you've got the norovirus and a twisted ankle. You'll trudge through snowdrifts on the school run with kid-sick down your work clothes. You'll then limp home (you've twisted your ankle getting off the bus, remember?) to make ice muffins for the PTA bake sale, before rushing off to chair the board meeting of a Very Important Company. Halfway through you'll get a text: "Urgent! My pillow needs plumping." And you'll immediately dash home to plump his ickle pillow, make him more Lemsip and put in disc two on the DVD player.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were some justification for this all-too-common scenario? Wouldn't it be great if there was evidence that man flu was an actual thing rather than a fiction born of hypochondria, slackerdom and sexist exploitation?

Fortunately, there is. Step forward neuroscientist Dr Amanda Ellison of Durham University: "When your immune system is under attack, the preoptic nucleus increases temperature to kill off the bugs," she says. "But men have more temperature receptors because that area of the brain is bigger in men than women." If only unsympathetic women could see men's preoptic nucleus and/or temperature receptors, they might be less prone to scepticism.

"So," concludes Dr Ellison, "men run a higher temperature and feel rougher ..." " Hence such headlines as "Man flu does exist" and "Years of sexist denial about male suffering disproved by lady brainiac". Ok I may have made the last one up.

To be fair, this is only the latest piece of science to be co-opted into demonstrating that men really aren't just self-pitying jerks who fold at the first hint of a symptom. In 2009, for instance, scientists at McGill University used mice in research into an enzyme called caspase-12, which can reduce the body's immune response to certain bacteria. They genetically engineered mice to make this enzyme. The female GM mice proved less susceptible to infection than the males because the oestrogen made by the female mice kept immunity levels high. The Mailconcluded: "Man flu is not a myth: female hormones give women stronger immune systems." Only one problem, wrote story-spoiling Guardian myth debunker Ben Goldacre: the research had nothing to do with flu viruses and the results couldn't be extrapolated to human beings..

No matter: there is a will to believe that man flu must exist – well, certainly among men who run the media. In 2010, research at the Cambridge University researchers came up with a theory predicting the adventurous lifestyle of the male means that they are more exposed to disease, but paradoxically that this lifestyle reduces their immunity. Or, as the Telegraph glossed it: "Man flu is no myth as scientists prove men suffer more from disease." In 2011, scientists at Ghent University reported that women have an extra copy of the female X-chromosome while men have only one, much smaller Y-chromosome. The result? Women are more able to cope with infections and disease. Cosmopolitan concluded: "You know how boys are utterly pathetic when it comes to being ill? It turns out it's not their fault as the reason is genetic!"

The claim that there is such a thing as man flu surely comes to this: men with the same symptoms as women suffer more because they're more sensitive. Somehow. Paradoxically, according to a nationwide flu surveycarried out by London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, women are more likely to have flu symptoms than men, probably because they tend to spend more time around children, who are more likely to have a flu-like illness in the first place. Women suffer more, but men suffer worse.

What we really need, perhaps, is a psychology of illness rather than research into genetic differences between men and women or gender-based immunocompetence levels. What this would amount to, probably, is asking people how they feel when they have flu. But would men tell the truth about their feelings if telling the truth risked reducing their bed-based slacker time? And even if they did, would women believe them? That goes to the heart not just of man flu, but trust between genders, and perhaps explains why science hasn't so far helped in deciding if man flu exists. It's an enigma wrapped in a damp towel.

I'd like to say more, but my immunocompetence levels are falling so I'm going to take my preoptic nucleus and superior temperature receptors to bed, along with a good book and a list of unreasonable demands for the woman in my life. "Men think they are going to die when they are unwell, so they go to bed and expect women to look after them," says Dr John Oxford, professor of virology at Queen Mary, University of London. How much longer we can get away with that is less clear.