Men with eating disorders under diagnosed

Many men with anorexia may delay treatment because they feared they wouldn't be taken seriously by physicians, according to media reports Thursday.

Researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Glasgow interviewed 39 young people aged 16 to 25 -- 25 percent men -- about their experiences with eating disorders.

The men with the eating disorder said they were slow to identify anorexia symptoms -- no eating for days; purging; and obsessive calorie counting, exercise and weighing -- because they thought eating disorders occurred was "something girls got," the researchers said.

Another reason they were slow to seek help is they didn’t know where to go or feared they wouldn’t be taken seriously by medical professionals.

In addition, there was a lack of information about eating disorders that were specifically targeted at men.

"Our findings suggest that men may experience particular problems in recognizing that they may have an eating disorder as a result of the continuing cultural construction of eating disorders as uniquely or predominantly a female problem," the researchers wrote in the journal BMJ Open.