Diagnostic Delay

What it is

A survey of 6,607 adults with autoimmune or inflammatory rheumatic disease, led by Melanie Sloan at the University of Cambridge and published in eClinicalMedicine in October 2026, asked people how long their diagnosis took and what they were told along the way. The most common interval from first symptoms to diagnosis was under three months for men and one to two years for women. Among women, 43 per cent reported a psychiatric misdiagnosis, against 33 per cent of men; for psychosomatic explanations the figures were 34 and 22 per cent.

Other studies measure delay from records. A 2015 analysis of 18,618 patients in UK primary care records, led by Nafees Din, found longer intervals for women in six of the cancers that affect both sexes, but not in the rest; pooled across cancers, the difference was about nine days. A 2012 study of 171 women with confirmed endometriosis in Austria and Germany reported a median of 10.4 years from first symptoms to diagnosis, and 74 per cent had received at least one wrong diagnosis. David Westergaard and colleagues analysed all hospital admissions in Denmark from 1994 to 2015, about 6.9 million patients, and found women were usually older at first hospital diagnosis, with exceptions including cancers and diseases of the blood and immune system.

In effect

For a reader, these figures show that "how long it took" depends on what is counted: a patient's memory of first symptoms, a primary care record or a hospital code. A headline about delay is only as strong as that measure. This page summarises research and is not medical advice; questions about symptoms belong with a qualified clinician.

What it does not say

The 2026 survey cannot say whether bias, earlier anxiety diagnoses or the way diseases present is doing the work. Every misdiagnosis in it was perceived and reported by the patient, some may have been a doctor's first working guess, the survey may have drawn people with worse experiences, and no response rate could be calculated. The sample was 91 per cent female, 70 per cent based in the UK and 88 per cent White, and women reported more anxiety diagnoses, 24 against 16 per cent. The authors call the work exploratory.

The Danish authors caution that age at first hospital diagnosis should not be read as age at onset. The cancer gap was small and not uniform across cancers.

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