Causes of Male Excess Mortality: Insights from Cloistered Populations

Abstract

The degree to which biological factors contribute to the existence and the widening of mortality differences by sex remains unclear. To address this question, a mortality analysis for the years 1890 to 1995 was performed comparing mortality data on more than 11,000 Catholic nuns and monks in Bavarian communities living in very nearly identical behavioral and environmental conditions with life table data for the general German population. While the mortality differences between women and men in the general German population increased considerably after World War II, they remained almost constant among the members of Bavarian religious orders during the entire observation period, with slight advantages for nuns. Thus, the higher differences observable in the general population cannot be attributed to biological factors. The different trends in sex-specific mortality between the general and the cloistered populations are caused exclusively by men in the general population who were unable to follow the trend in mortality reduction of women, nuns, and especially monks. Under the special environmental conditions of nuns and monks, biological factors appear to confer a maximum survival advantage for women of no more than one year in remaining life expectancy at young adult ages. Copyright 2003 by The Population Council, Inc..

The gender gap in mortality: How much is explained by behavior?

“…Since the first life tables were constructed in the mid 18th century it is a well established fact that women, on average, live longer than men (Luy, 2003). While the gender-gap, defined as female excess life expectancy, was first observed in the now developed countries, in the 21st century it is basically a universal phenomenon.…”

“…Preston and Wang (2006), for example, investigate sex differences in the mortality of smokers and non-smokers and estimate that changes in smoking patterns contributed about 20 % to the declining gender-gap. Luy (2003) compares life expectancy of the cloistered subpopulation in Bavaria with that of the German population at large. For the period 1965 to 1990 he observes that the life expectancy of nuns exceeds that of monks by 2.3 years.…”

Future inequalities in life expectancy in England and Wales – Authors' reply

“…2,3 Investigators of the most recent of such reports concluded that "the current excess of female life expectancy in adulthood is a relatively new demographic phenomenon". 2 The divergence and reconvergence of male-female mortality is well known to be largely due to different levels and trends in deaths from external causes (injuries) and from disorders such as lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases, for which risk factors (eg, smoking) have different trends in men and women.…”

Changes in the health situation of the population of Poland following the accession to the European Union (Compared to central and eastern european countries)

“…Biological determinants alone make the average life expectancy of males shorter than of females by one year to two years (Abdulraheem et al, 2011;Luty, 2003;Ram, 1993). Larger differences are already conditioned by non-biological factors.…”