One of the issues I spend a lot of time dealing with when
I do my presentations is this curious but depressing (depressing if you happen
to be a male, that is) fact: that one of the biggest risk factors (perhaps the
single biggest depending on how you do the math) is being born male.
How risky?
Very: being born male results in a higher risk of
premature death at nearly every stage of life.
Why?
Lots of reasons have been proposed, of course, and the
ones that I spend a lot of time discussing are those related to riskier
lifestyles among males compared to females, so that some studies have shown
pretty clearly that “when women begin to live like men, they begin to die like
men”.
For example, when women begin to smoke like men, they
begin to develop the same early-death conditions that men have had.
But it has to be more than lifestyle, I think, to explain
these differences, and to back that up, an American study just out (published
online Sept. 2 in the journal, Pediatrics) found that of the 19 conditions they looked at, boys had significantly
higher risks of dying from 17 of them.
In other words, although it’s
rare for young people under the age of 20 to die, thank god, of those who do,
boys are 44 % more likely than girls to die, and since boys are more likely to
die than girls, it couldn’t just be riskier behaviour that leaves young males
more vulnerable to premature death.
So besides being much more
likely to die from accidents, which is to be expected, young men are also much
more likely to develop – and die of – cancers, for example.
If you ask me, this is an
issue we should be putting much more emphasis – and spending much more – on.
