Rethinking mortality rates in men and women: do men age faster?

Abstract

Abstract:Although women on average live longer than men, differences in the pace of ageing are relatively unstudied and remain controversial. We thus employ mathematical methods previously established in model organisms to compare the pace of ageing between the sexes using freely available mortality data from 37 countries. Surprisingly, we found that the mortality rates of women almost universally increase faster than those of men, which is equivalent to faster ageing. This finding implies that the gap in life expectancy should continue to close with progress in healthcare since the longer lifespan of women is mainly due to the higher "starting" mortality of men. Our results may also help explain the mortality-morbidity paradox, i.e. why women live longer but are sicker than men. Main text:The life expectancies of men and women are widely recognized as being different:women worldwide live longer than men. This logically leads to the question whether women also age slower than men. Both "yes" and "no" answers have found some support (1-3).

A previously unrecognized peculiarity of late-life human mortality kinetics?

“…This is still a highly controversial issue (Lenart, Kuruczova et al 2019). There are grounds to suggest that females live longer than males not because their aging rate estimated according to GM is slower but because their initial mortality is lower in humans (Lenart, Kuruczova et al 2017, Golubev 2019) and mice (Kunstyr andLeuenberger 1975, Golubev 2019), and the two parameters are negatively correlated according to the compensation effect of mortality (Golubev 2019). It is also worth mentioning that aging rate seems to start decreasing in women after ca.…”