Male and female life expectancy; sinonasal inflammation and your brain; eye injury prevention; the virus and RNA transcription

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Why do women now outlive men and what factors drive the gender life‑expectancy gap?

Norman Swan 0:00

Hello and welcome to this week's Health Report podcast with me, Norman Swan.

Tegan Taylor 0:04

And me, Tegan Taylor.

Norman Swan 0:07

Today, a possible explanation for some of those COVID viral fragments they keep finding in sewage and how some people can keep testing positive for weeks.

Tegan Taylor 0:16

One of the leading causes of single eye blindness in Australia and the latest research into it may be safe eating until later.

Norman Swan 0:23

Glad I'm on a diet. The link between sinusitis and feeling foggy and what it might tell us about long COVID and the sex gap in life expectancy. For most of human history, men have lived longer than women. But since the mid-19th century, when advances in antisepsis in the labour ward and obstetrics in general meant that women survived pregnancy and childbirth, women have lived longer than men, by an average of approximately three years than Australians. But in some countries, the gender gap has been as high as 14 years. The question is why? Baby boys have died more often than baby girls. Young men live a lot more dangerously than young women. But maybe it's more than that. Dr. Ilya Koshnitsky is a demographer in the Interdisciplinary Center on Population Dynamics at the University of Southern Denmark, has tried to find the answer to this question.

Norman Swan 1:13

Welcome to the Health Report, Ilya. Hello. Hi. So how did you do this study?

Ilya Koshnitsky 1:21

Well, For this study, we took the best available information on human mortality. There is the renowned human mortality database, so it contains information on the long time series of human mortality for the countries where good statistics are available. And we just looked... So in demography, we have this indicator of life expectancy. This is a summary measure of the age profile of mortality in a population. In the first easy approximation, it gives us the number of years people in this population live. And what we observe is... Measure from birth. Yes, yes. What we observed is that there is a sex gap in life expectancy. Women live longer. So we explored which ages contribute most to this sex gap. So we performed the analysis known as decomposition analysis in demography.

Ilya Koshnitsky 2:27

which basically gives us the specific contribution of ages into this sex gap.

Norman Swan 2:34

So let's start then at birth because it's well recognized that unfortunately baby boys don't do as well as baby girls and there tends to be a higher mortality rate in babies. What contribution, I mean first of all does that still exist and secondly what contribution does that make to the life expectancy gap between men and women?

Ilya Koshnitsky 2:57

Yes, higher infant mortality among baby boys still exists, and this is actually one of the most fundamental regularities we find in human mortality, that male mortality is always higher across the whole age span, even among infants today. But the interesting finding of the paper is that As we moved on along the demographic transition, as we managed to eradicate almost all of the infant mortality, today babies almost never die after birth. It happens very, very rarely compared to...

Norman Swan 3:44

So even if it's more common in baby boys, it's so rare, it's not making a big contribution, if much contribution at all, to the life expectancy gap.

Ilya Koshnitsky 3:52

Yeah, exactly. I'm

Norman Swan 3:54

sorry, just before you go on, just so I can explain to the audience. And when you say demographic transition, this is the transition between the 19th and early 20th century from poor countries and low-income countries to richer and richer countries with different lifestyles and different causes of death, for example.

Ilya Koshnitsky 4:13

Yes, well, that's true. In the first approximation, the demographic transition is the transition from the reproductive regime of high fertility and high mortality to what we have now, very low fertility and very low mortality. But one of the biggest steps of this transition was the invention of ways to eradicate infant mortality. So we can save almost all the live-born kids now.

Norman Swan 4:43

So let's move to young men and young women, because young men do live more dangerously than young women. And in some countries in the world, like Russia, they have three times the mortality of young women.