Sex Differences in Lifespan

Credit: UAB

Evmedreview Correspondent Steven Austad, together with Kathleen Fischer, has a new paper  in Cell Metabolism on sex differences in human longevity. In many species, which sex lives longer often depends on a host of different environmental conditions. Longevity can switch from favouring males to favouring females. But in humans, women always live longer, and, according to Austad, despite this being a perennial and absorbing fact, we don’t have an answer to why this is so. But there is a downside to female longevity, say Austad and Fischer. Despite living longer, women’s lives are blemished in their latter years by higher levels of morbidity. This mortality-morbidity paradox, they say, may be a consequence of greater connective tissue responsiveness to sex hormones in women. Various proposed mechanisms to account for greater longevity in women, such as hormonal influences on inflammatory and immunological responses, or greater resistance to oxidative damage, they say, lack empirical support. For a quick look at this research, Physorg has a nice precis.

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