Eating disorders are far more prevalent in women than men, with only 10% of cases occurring in males. This discrepancy may be partially explained by biological and cultural factors, but it also suggests diagnostic difficulties.

Introduced by the description of a clinical case of Anorexia Nervosa (AN) in a male patient, this work reviews and compares diagnostic features of eating disorders, namely AN, in both genders, emphasizing the most common pitfalls to its recognition in men, in order to reduce the number of undiagnosed cases.

We searched for scientific articles about this topic on the databases MEDLINE, LILACS and PsycINFO, using the search words “eating disorder”, “anorexia nervosa” and “male”. We chose to preferentially include original articles and recent reviews.