In the year 1980, the J. Geils band stated to the world that love stinks. While one can definitely argue whether or not this overwhelming and gentle spirit of affection has a drawback, competing hard to find a mate surely does. There is even the possibility that it shortens a person’s lifespan. A recent study demonstrates that the ratios between men and women have an impact on human longevity. Compared to men who have not competed hard for a mate, men, who have reached sexual maturity in an environment in which they outnumber women by much, live three months less on average. This decline in the lifespan becomes sharper as the gender ratio becomes steeper. The gender ratio is commonly known as the operational sex ratio.
In accordance to Nicholas Christakis, the senior author of the study who is also a professor of medicine and medical sociology at the Harvard Medical School in addition to being a professor of sociology at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, at first blush, one quarter of a year might not appear to be much, however it is similar to the effects of, maybe taking an aspirin on a daily basis, or engaging in exercises moderately. He states that a person aged 65 years old is normally expected to live 15.4 years more. In such instances, taking out three months from this block of time is considerable. The results of the study can be found in the August issue of the Demography journal.
Previously, a link between gender ratios and longevity had been recognised based on the study of animals. However, this was not done in human beings. In order to search for an association in human beings, Christakis joined forces with researchers from diverse universities, namely, the University of Wisconsin, the Northwestern University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The researchers examined two distinctive datasets.
Initially, the researchers looked for information from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. The latter is a long-term project that involved persons who graduated from the Wisconsin high schools in the year 1957. The researchers calculated the gender ratios of every graduating class of the high schools and then ascertained the period that the graduates went on to live. After having adjusted for multiple factors, they found out that, five decades later, the men from the classes that were comprised of boys in majority did not live as long as those men who were in more gender-balanced classes.
Based on a measurement, the mortality for a person ages 65 years old, who had experienced a sharp sex ratio years earlier when he was a teenager, was 1.6 percent greater than a person who had not face such harsh competition for having the female attention.
Subsequently, the research team made a comparison between Medicare claims and census data for a whole national sample of more than 7 million of men throughout the United States. They reached comparable results. However, for some technical reasons, the study was not able to evaluate the results for women who outnumbered their male counterparts at sexual maturity.
Much attention has been given to the detrimental social effects of gender disparities in countries like India and China, where internal migration, selective abortion and various other factors have caused that in some area the men outnumber the women by up to 20 percent. Environments as such, which are already linked with a marked increase in human trafficking and violence, seem to shorten the lifespan of the people as well.
Even though the researchers have not explored the mechanisms that might be responsible for this phenomenon, Christakis is of view that it develops from a combination of biological and social factors. At the end, finding a mate can indeed prove to be stressful, and stress is a well-known contributor to health disorders.
Christakis declares that human beings come to embody the social world that is found around them. And is there something more social than the dynamics of sexual competition?
Source: Harvard and E-science News
Fri, Aug 13, 2010
Anti Aging, Longevity