To be interested in why women generally live longer than men?

[JFDIYOLO]

Quite a few articles doing the rounds this week.

The XX chromosome combo seems more robust - if there's something wrong with one X, a woman's other X will compensate (eg I probably carry my father's colour blindness but my mother's healthy X patched that). But male embryos/men, with only the one X, may be more vulnerable.

Female embryos are more engaged with building the immune system very early on than male.

Men are more likely to do risky behaviour like motorbikes, driving dangerous, drinking, fighting - testosterone is a dangerous drug?

Men are more likely to be doing dangerous professions - building sites, deep sea diving, the military etc, and to die at work.

Men are more likely to murder and be murdered.

Men are less likely to consult a doctor for health issues - I once came home to find my partner googling 'What should I do about this pain in my chest' (yes, heart attack) whereas I'm on the phone if it doesn't look right, feel right, act right and to take every routine test on offer - because I've been socialised to know my entire female anatomy is trying to kill me.

Men are less likely to talk about and ask for help with mental and emotional issues which can descend into depression, and higher male suicides.

Even though women still die in childbirth, suffer PND, are way more likely to be murdered by their intimate partners and are prescribed drugs that were habitually not developed using female test cohorts.

www.sciencenewstoday.org/why-do-women-live-longer-than-men-scientists-say-the-answer-lies-in-evolution

I was thinking diet, too. And aversion to healthcare, especially amongst some men.

Yes,DH was good to let me have a sterilisation, which would mean being admitted and an overnight stay, full sedation etc.
He only went for the vasectomy when they refused me the operation. My explanation as to why they said no, finally helped him realise that there was a massive difference between his procedure and the female equivalent.

@PrizedPickledPopcorn

"Why wouldn’t men be more useful in old age though? It’s not as if women can breastfeed in old age. We aren’t physically useful, so why can’t men make themselves useful too?"

Because they get old and weak and are no longer able to bring down a woolly mammoth or sabre tooth tiger. Women on the other hand will still contribute by helping to rear the upcoming generation. Whether that's through their experience of child rearing/bearing, cooking or skinning animals to make clothes and bedding or milking goats. If the tribe's children were left to old men to look after, can you imagine the result? It just wouldn't happen.

Because we don’t do things like balance precariously on stair bannisters in socked feet to change a lightbulb.

What I think ,ore interesting, is married men living longer than single, whereas for women it’s the other way round!

I don’t know the reasons exactly- but when my daughter threatened an early labour and I was being scanned and heart rate monitored they asked if it was a boy or girl - when I said girl they said girls are stronger and have better chances than boys if born early. Which I didn’t know, so it seems to be a recurring theme.

Isn't it only one Y out of forty six chromosomes? I can never remember. Still that is one X without a - slightly different - copy. A weakness in the immune system. Women did slightly better during COVID iirc.

Isn't a large part due to men having to work harder physiologically to keep themselves alive (higher muscle mass, bone density etc) so their bodies fatigue earlier.

Men are hugely more vulnerable to respiratory ailments, at all ages and especially > age 60. That is biological, nothing to do with risk or occupation. Males have a much larger lung capacity ( which allowed them to chase down the mammoth which kept everyone in the group eating enough protein and iron so thank goodness for the risk takers...) and maybe trade off of the larger lung-cardio capacity is more lung vulnerability in old age.

It's not just lungs, though. afaik, male body Organs don't age as well as women's except maybe brains... I've read that adjusting for age, women are more vulnerable to dementia. Could that be lifestyle-linked, women are much more likely to have sedentary lifestyles? Or something biological to do with less vigorous cardio system. Heck If I know.

I'd suggest the main underlying factor is that men think they will live forever (testosterone eggs this idea of being "strong" on) and engage in behaviours to excess that women wouldn't, on the whole, because we think our time is finite and we want to look after offspring and pass on survival instincts. That is why we are all on this site, for example.

They have linked menopause to dementia - the lack of estrogen. HRT seems to be protective in helping with the amyloid plaques and tau tangles.

Anecdotally, a lot of the women I know tend to abstain from unhealthy food, including my mum. When she find out she was pre-diabetic she changed her way of eating, whereas her brother didn’t. Many men seem to have a more devil may care attitude.

Is it true that smaller people live longer, on average?

I believe studies are on men who were like 5ft 2 & basketball players over 6ft 5.

I thought men tended to be more stressed

Aren't younger parents more likely to have boys because they need more "investment".

I knew more boys were born, and I knew it evened out but I didn't realise it evened out quite so quickly.

How??
How can that happen by pure chance of nature??

'Tis because men waste a lot of their lives waiting outside of t'oilets. If we wus to get that back and add it t'end we wud live longer.

Smoking rates were always higher in men than women

The old thinking I was taught us that females if all species live longer because essentially having young is hard. Women survive that and you pass on your tough DNA.

I remember hearing that testosterone weakens the heart over time which is why men will eventually die of heart trouble if something else doesn’t get them first.

I thought it was all to do with the continuation of the human race. Men can have hundreds of children, but women can only carry a few over their life time. So women are therefore more important and nature has made them stronger.

I think it might be biological. Nature has evolved so every species tried to survive.

In humans, humans would survive (but not for centuries) with one man and 50 women. That could result in 40 or so babies a year.

One woman and 50 men? Only one baby a year possible.

From an evolutionary POV though. If we ‘needed’ men for the species, the older men whose testosterone didn’t hurt them would pass their genes on and confer advantage to that trait. And the ones whose testosterone did hurt them, wouldn’t. So over time we’d have older men. In the same way that we have older women.

If you pretend genes ‘care’ (a la Selfish Gene) you can say that the species ‘cares’ if women live longer but doesn’t ‘care’ about men. Because older women are valuable and older men aren’t. Older women must be useful to the continence of the species and confer advantage.

Every other health issue stems from that.

As my professor used to say, “eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap”.

But breeding populations need variation so almost all animals default over time to around 50:50.

It was approximately 80/20 and audits were done on successful not unsuccessful

yes to woman taking less violent route to death, also taking themselves to places away from the family home, whereas men would take themselves to the garage at home