Everyone knows that the life expectancy of animals varies greatly: there are mayflies and, at the other extreme, sea turtles that seem to be able to live up to three hundred years. Apart from a natural limit to lifespan, circumstances obviously matter a lot. Mice that might not survive a harsh winter survive if we cherish them as pets.
Life expectancy
This principle applies just as well to humans. Our life expectancy is largely determined by things that we have created or produced ourselves, in short, prosperity and culture. This is evident from the fact that life expectancy in many developing countries is not much more than years, which was also the case in our country in the Middle Ages. However, today the Netherlands seems to be the world record holder after Japan with 74 years for men and 81 for women. There is also a significant gender difference in many other countries. The difference is based on one or more gender-related hereditary characteristics.
- Responsible are mainly the risks that work entails, as well as certain sports, lifestyle and not to mention lifestyle habits such as smoking a lot and drinking alcohol.
- The sexes differ in the extent to which they detect symptoms early (or in the extent to which they pay attention to their bodies).
- Moreover, men and women differ from each other in their tendency to seek medical and possibly psychological help.
- It is important how the doctor treats and has previously treated diseases in both men and women: if the woman would generally receive better therapy, it is conceivable that she would live longer for that reason. (It should be noted that 7 percent of ailments resolve on their own and that only 10 percent of all medical consultations lead to effective treatment).
Men
The so-called stronger sex dies more often from accidents. In addition, men in particular are affected by cardiovascular diseases that shorten lifespan, as well as fatal forms of cancer (especially of the lungs and prostate). The periods when men are ill are relatively long, but on average they visit the doctor less often than women.
Furthermore, men smoke and drink more. This is an important fact, because the combination of tobacco and alcohol in particular promotes a large number of serious diseases, while alcohol and nicotine counteract each other mentally. Furthermore, men sleep a little shorter than women, they are (in the United States) more likely to be overweight, they are more exposed to hazards at work, and perhaps also important, they have a more indifferent attitude towards their health than women.
Women
The female sex is more often plagued by acute diseases that resolve on their own after a short time or that can be effectively treated. However, women are also relatively often plagued by chronic ailments. These diseases spoil the enjoyment of life, but are usually not a direct threat to life itself. Furthermore, absenteeism due to illness is higher for women than for men, with the understanding that the number of consecutive days of absenteeism is usually smaller (menstruation could also play a role in this).
Women visit the doctor quite often, they use, again comparatively, a larger amount of medication and they pay more attention to what seems to be going on in their body. The latter could have to do with the fact that it is women who keep an eye on the health of the children. Women talk about their health relatively often and are on average more dissatisfied with it than men.
Furthermore, it is said that women suffer more psychologically than men in that they are generally disadvantaged in socio-economic terms or feel privileged (in that respect the tide is turning somewhat: the younger generation is replacing traditional complaining and nagging from the elderly due to more initiative, and the fact that there are more and more part-time jobs is a positive development). Nevertheless, it is said in the literature that women often feel more unhappy than men. All this is nice to know, but the list does not contain a pertinent explanation for the difference of seven years in life expectancy.
Difference
There are a large number of people who attribute most of the difference to alcohol and tobacco. There is reason for this in that the number of lung cancer cases in women has increased after they started smoking on some scale. However,
others do not agree with this: Social factors are also said to play an important role. For example, people in the American state of Utah live longer than in Nevada. Mormons in Utah do not smoke or drink and they generally have stable social networks. In Nevada, on the other hand, people smoke and drink, contacts are looser and the divorce rate is high. The last two factors alone contribute to excess mortality among men: single men often take poor care of themselves, and the loss of their partner is often associated with a high risk of accidents, alcoholism and so on.
Furthermore, there are indications that women generally have more intimate relationships than men, a fact that also appears to reduce mortality.
In short, the woman lives longer, but in her own opinion, socially and perhaps also medically, under less pleasant circumstances. If you multiply the life expectancy and the (subjective) quality of existence between the sexes, you might get a constant.
There is also a downside to the extension of life expectancy compared to the state of nature. Many people spend the last years of their lives in highly unpleasant circumstances: half-sided paralysis, shortness of breath, demented, confused, lonely. The latter can hardly be interpreted as a gain.
Melatonin
A substance that probably partly determines life expectancy is the hormone melatonin, which is made from serotonin in the epiphysis or pineal gland. The epiphysis of young animals has been transplanted into older conspecifics and an increase in life expectancy by a quarter has been observed. Adding melatonin to drinking water would be associated with an increase in life expectancy by 20 percent in animals; Older men are said to show signs of rejuvenation when consuming melatonin. Melatonin probably has a slowing effect on a number of physical processes: in animals, melatonin supplementation delays both sexual maturity and the end of sexual maturity.
Marriage and Divorce
An important fact is that divorce or a bad marriage of the parents reduces the life expectancy of a child by several years, especially boys. This fact can partly be explained by the fact that divorce often encourages children to take up habits such as smoking and drinking, but such an event often also leads to a certain social maladjustment that has all kinds of repercussions.
As far as the causes of death are concerned, there is no connection with specific ailments such as cancer or cardiovascular disease. It is remarkable that the death of a parent has little effect on the life expectancy of the child. It appears that entering into a marriage has a life-prolonging effect, unless the partners have a bad relationship. The mortality risk of separated group members and those who lose their partners is also relatively high. Finally, children of divorced parents have a greater chance of getting divorced themselves.
There is also a connection with some personal characteristics: impulsive children in particular are at greater risk of both a bad marriage and a relatively early death. So there are two variables at stake that seem to run parallel: people with certain characteristics die earlier and they tend to enter into bad marriages.
A surprising fact is that cheerful children have a relatively short lifespan. This may partly be due to the fact that these children are (later) more inclined to smoke, drink alcohol and take all kinds of risks. A second possibility is that cheerful people easily ignore physical signals that indicate an illness.
The following can be seen from the mortality curves. The greatest risk of mortality is found among men who (at the time) did not function very conscientiously and whose parents divorced during their youth. Conscientious, serious children, on the other hand, live longer, even after controlling for smoking and drinking. Among men, the other extreme is formed by conscientious people whose parents stayed together and had a good marriage. As might be expected, the longest living are women whose parents maintained their marriages.
summarizing
It is clear that individual psychological factors also play a role in life expectancy. The tendency to behave impulsively is particularly bad in this regard. Secondly, the family situation has not inconsiderable effects on the children, and the two sets of factors exert their influence independently of each other. There is no answer to the question why women live considerably longer on average than men.