A Battle for Love in Younger Years Appears to
Shorten the Life of Male Senior Citizens
Harvard study finds men who mature where women far
out number men, making mating less competitive, live longer than others
Aug. 9, 2010 Senior citizens seem to always be
interested in studies about longevity. Who is not curious about how long
they will live? There is a new factor for senior citizen men to
calculate men who matured in an environment where men far outnumber
women live, on average, three months less than those who matured among
more females and less competition for a mate.
Working hard for love does shorten your life by at
least three months, says a new study from Harvard Medical School. But it
can get worse -
the steeper the gender ratio (also known as the operational sex
ratio), the sharper the decline in lifespan.
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suggests any prolonged sedentary behavior, such as sitting at a desk or
in front of a computer, may pose a health risk, too
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story
"At first blush, a quarter of a year may not seem
like much, but it is comparable to the effects of, say, taking a daily
aspirin, or engaging in moderate exercise," says Nicholas Christakis,
senior author on the study and professor of medicine and medical
sociology at Harvard Medical School as well as professor of sociology at
Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
"A 65-year-old man is typically expected to live
another 15.4 years. Removing three months from this block of time is
significant."
These results are published in the August issue of
the journal Demography.
Sept. 19, 2004 - New insights into ancient mating
says there is no covering up ancient sexual dalliances of men tomcatting
around and traveling far from home to do it. They also report men often
were squeezed out of mating by stronger males, which caused twice as
many women as men to pass on their genes.
More...
An association between gender ratios and longevity
had been established through studies of animals before, but never in
humans. To search for a link in people, Christakis collaborated with
researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of
Wisconsin and Northwestern University. The researchers looked at two
distinct datasets.
First, they examined information from the Wisconsin
Longitudinal Study, a long-term project involving individuals who
graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. The researchers
calculated the gender ratios of each high-school graduating class, then
ascertained how long the graduates went on to live.
After adjusting for a multitude of factors, they
discovered that, 50 years later, men from classes with an excess of boys
did not live as long as men whose classes were gender-balanced.
By one measurement, mortality for a 65-year-old who
had experienced a steeper sex ratio decades earlier as a teenager was
1.6 percent higher than one who hadn't faced such stiff competition for
female attention.
Next, the research team compared Medicare claims
data with census data for a complete national sample of more than 7
million men throughout the United States and arrived at similar results
(for technical reasons, the study was unable to evaluate results for
women who outnumbered men at sexual maturity).
Much attention has been paid to the deleterious
social effects of gender imbalances in countries such as China and
India, where selective abortion, internal migration and other factors
have in some areas resulted in men outnumbering women by up to twenty
percent. Such an environment, already associated with a marked increase
in violence and human trafficking, appears to shorten life as well.
The researchers have not investigated mechanisms
that might account for this phenomenon, but Christakis suspects that it
arises from a combination of social and biological factors. After all,
finding a mate can be stressful, and stress as a contributor to health
disorders has been well documented.
Says Christakis, "We literally come to embody the
social world around us, and what could be more social than the dynamics
of sexual competition?"
This research was funded by the National Institutes
of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Aug. 9, 2010 Senior citizens seem to always be
interested in studies about longevity. Who is not curious about how long
they will live? There is a new factor for senior citizen men to
calculate men who matured in an environment where men far outnumber
women live, on average, three months less than those who matured among
more females and less competition for a mate.
