New research suggests that bisexual men and women have poorer health than gays and heterosexuals.

Researchers at Rice University examined the self-rated health of more than 10,000 gay, lesbian and bisexual adults and more than 405,000 heterosexual adults to see how health "differed across sexual orientation,"The Economic Times reported.

"According to the Institute of Medicine, existing health research on the sexual minority population is sparse and typically does not make distinctions between the different types of sexual minorities," Bridget Gorman, lead author of the study, said in a statement. "We developed this study both to examine the health of these different sexual minority groups and to assess how risk factors for poor health contribute to their overall health."

For the study, researchers also analyzed the participants' lifestyle according to a number of factors that traditionally impact health, including socioeconomic status, health behaviors and social support and well-being, PsychCentral reported.

They found that 19.5 percent of bisexual men and 18.5 percent bisexual women rated their health as "poor or fair," the highest proportion among the groups surveyed. In contrast, only 11.9 percent of men identifying as gay and 10.6 percent of women identifying as lesbian rated their health as "poor or fair," the lowest proportion of those surveyed. Health was also rated poor by 14.5 percent of heterosexual men and 15.6 percent of heterosexual women.

They also found that bisexual men and women are disproportionately disadvantaged on important social, economic and behavioral factors strongly associated with health and well-being. For example, bisexual men and women were the least likely of the three groups to be college-educated, and they were also more likely to smoke.

"If bisexuals are minorities within the minority and experience unique and more extreme forms of discrimination, this might contribute to disparities in things like earnings, educational attainment, the propensity to smoke cigarettes and other factors that affect well-being," Justin Denney, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research's Urban Health Program and an assistant professor of sociology at Rice, said in a statement.

Researchers said their study illustrates the importance of examining health status among specific sexual minority groups, and not among "sexual minorities" in the aggregate.

The findings are detailed in the journal Demography.