Maintaining Movember’s momentum
By Dr Aiden Hannah and Dylan Powell, Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions
As November comes to an end, so too does the notable increase in the number of men spouting moustaches. The reason for this phenomenon is the annual Movember campaign which, for 19 years, has sought to raise awareness of and fund research on men’s health issues, specifically men’s mental health, suicide prevention, prostate and testicular cancers.1Although this year’s campaign has now concluded and it’s safe to remove that moustache, Movember’s efforts to maintain awareness and fund initiatives to improve men’s health continue throughout the year.2Our blog this week explores some of these key men’s health challenges, the impact of deprivation and wider health disparities, and the importance of Movember in helping to improve men’s health outcomes.
What is Movember?
As many of you will know, Movember originated in 2003 in Australia when two friends who realised that growing moustaches had fallen out of fashion joked about bringing them back by convincing their friends to ‘grow a Mo’. Inspired by a friend’s mother who was fundraising for breast cancer, they focused their campaign on men’s health and prostate cancer. Since 2003 participation has grown rapidly across the world, raising over £802 million and supporting over 1,250 projects.3In addition to growing facial hair, people can also raise funds and awareness in a variety of ways, including:
- ‘Move for Movember’, where individuals are encouraged to run or walk 60 km over the month of November for the 60 men lost to suicide every hour around the world
- ‘Host a Mo-ment’, whether in person or virtually
- ‘Mo Your own Way’.4
Why do we need Movember and its focus on men’s health?
Movember’s impact in increasing awareness of men’s health has been crucial. Their mission statement, to reduce the number of men dying prematurely, is focused on three key areas:
- prostate cancer - in the UK one in eight men will receive a diagnosis of prostate cancer in their lifetime and over 333,550 men are living with or beyond prostate cancer
- testicular cancer - around 2,300 men are diagnosed with testicular cancer every year in the UK. Testicular cancer is the most common cancer among young men however the odds of survival are improving at over 95 per cent, but only if diagnosed early
- suicide - globally, one man dies by suicide every minute; men account for three out of four suicide deaths.5
Raising awareness of the health disparities across the UK
While raising awareness has been pivotal to increasing understanding of men’s health issues, there remains a need to understand how wider health disparities influence health outcomes. One disparity highlighted by the Movember campaign is the difference in life expectancies for men and woman. Indeed, health inequalities are seen between different socio-economic groups, between the able bodied and disabled, and across different geographies. For example, in 2020 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that people in England, on average, have a higher life expectancy at birth for males and females than those in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.6 Indeed, Scotland has the lowest life expectancy at birth of all the UK countries. Figures from the National Records of Scotland show further falls this year and highlight that Glasgow has the lowest life expectancy at just 72.9 years for males and 78 years for females.7
In Scotland, males in the least deprived ten per cent of the country can expect to live 13.7 years more than those in the most deprived ten per cent and in England there is a ten-year gap in life expectancy between males in the most and least deprived areas.8 These statistics are an important reminder of the intertwined relationship between socio-economic status and men’s physical and mental health.
What are the drivers of these inequalities?
While the causes of health inequities are very complex, there are several factors that can affect a person’s ability to live a healthy lifestyle and enjoy positive physical and mental health outcomes. Our recent report Identifying the gap: Understanding the drivers of inequality in public health, noted that decades of research demonstrates that a lack of access to medical care and unhealthy lifestyles only partially explain the differences in healthy life expectancy. Health inequalities are shaped much more by the social determinants of health (SDoH). SDoH are known as ‘the causes of the causes of ill health’, comprising the conditions in which people are born, grow up, live, work and grow old. The social determinants are recognised globally as a core dimension of public health policy requiring intervention and a focus on prevention. Indeed, the SDOH are themselves shaped by a set of inextricably linked economic, political, environmental and behavioural forces, including:
- smoking, diet and substance abuse
- availability of fair employment and pay
- education levels
- housing
- living and working environment
- access to public services
- social networks.
Health inequalities are widening
Research by Oxford University found that in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered life expectancy losses not seen since World War Two. The research covered 29 countries and found that in most of the countries males experienced larger declines in life expectancy than females. The largest declines were among males in the US (2.2 years lower than 2019 levels), followed by Lithuanian males (1.7 years).9 The reasons for this have been attributed to both biological factors (including hormones and immune response), and social factors including occupation and other behaviours impacting exposure risk.10
It’s long been acknowledged that men and women experience mental and physical health problems differently. For example, when it comes to mental health: men report lower levels of life satisfaction than women; men are less likely to access psychological therapies than women; nearly three-quarters of adults who go missing are men; 87 per cent of rough sleepers are men. Men are nearly three times as likely as women to become dependent on alcohol and three times as likely to report frequent drug use. Men are more likely to be compulsorily detained (or ‘sectioned’) for treatment than women. Men are also more likely to be victims of violent crime (1.5 times more likely than women).11
Likewise in relation to physical ill-health conditions, men are more likely than women to develop heart disease (in the UK, one in seven men and one in 11 women will die from disease of the heart arteries). Moreover, one in ten men aged 50 have a heart age ten years older than they are. Various reasons are thought to be the causes of increased cardiovascular disease (CVD) numbers in men. For example, men tend to cope with stress differently compared to women. Studies show they also tend to pay less attention to following a healthy diet, be more overweight than women, and more likely to ignore their own symptoms and wellbeing.12
Conclusion
The evidence is unequivocal, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to reducing health inequalities and improving health outcomes for all. Our research for this blog has also illustrated why different tactics are needed to tackle men’s health problems. The Movember movement, with its focus on growing a moustache, improving education and building communities where men feel more comfortable talking about their physical and mental health, has a crucial role to play. So too do the many fundraising efforts to support critical research and provide support services and centres for those who might otherwise remain disengaged. As health inequalities continue to widen across many groups of society, including men, it is important that throughout the year we all reflect on ways that we can help to improve awareness of key health issues affecting us all and help to save lives.
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1 https://uk.movember.com/about/history
3 https://uk.movember.com/about/money
5Ibid.
8 https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/whats-happening-life-expectancy-england
10 https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/01/harvard-study-looks-at-covid-19-sex-disparities/
11 https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/statistics/men-women-statistics
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