Why don’t men live as long as women?
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The uneven impact of cardiovascular illness-related
deaths on men raises the question of whether men and women face different heart
disease risks. (Photo/Wicked Little Cake Company)
Across the entire world, women can expect to live longer
than men. But why does this occur and was this always the case?
According to a new study led by USC Davis School of
Gerontology researchers, significant differences in life expectancies between
the sexes first emerged as recently as the turn of the 20th century. As
infectious disease prevention, improved diets and other positive health
behaviors were adopted by people born during the 1800s and early 1900s, death
rates plummeted, but women began reaping the longevity benefits at a much
faster rate.
In the wake of this massive but uneven decrease in
mortality, a review of global data points to heart disease as the culprit
behind most of the excess deaths documented in adult men, said USC University
Professor and AARP Professor of Gerontology Eileen Crimmins.
“We were surprised at how the divergence in mortality
between men and women, which originated as early as 1870, was concentrated in
the 50-to-70 age range and faded out sharply after age 80,” Crimmins said.
The study was conducted with USC University Professor and
ARCO/William F. Kieschnick Professor in the Neurobiology of Aging Caleb Finch and research
associate Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez of the Center for Demography of Health and
Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It examined the life spans of
people born between 1800 and 1935 in 13 developed nations.
Focusing on mortality in adults over the age of 40, the
team found that in individuals born after 1880, female death rates decreased 70
percent faster than those of males. Even when the researchers controlled for
smoking-related illnesses, cardiovascular disease appeared to still be the
cause of the vast majority of excess deaths in adult men over 40 for the same
time period.
Surprisingly, smoking accounted for only 30 percent of
the difference in mortality between the sexes after 1890, Crimmins said.
The uneven impact of cardiovascular illness-related
deaths on men, especially during middle and early older age, raises the
question of whether men and women face different heart disease risks due to
inherent biological risks and/or protective factors at different points in
their lives, Finch said.
“Further study could include analysis of diet and
exercise activity differences between countries, deeper examination of genetics
and biological vulnerability between sexes at the cell level, and the
relationship of these findings to brain health at later ages,” he said.
The study appears in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences and was supported by the National
Institute on Aging.
BY Beth
Newcomb
Source - news.usc.edu