Life Expectancy Higher for Women

If God made Eve from Adam's rib, perhaps he learned a few things after making Adam that he was able to apply to Eve. It turns out that women are just biologically superior to men - and they're made that way.

Life expectancy in the U.S. is different for girls and boys: A girl born in 2012 can expect to live to 81.2 years—almost 5 years longer than a boy baby born the same year, who’s likely live to age 76.4.

Did you know that two and a half as many boys are conceived as girls, but they’re so much more likely to succumb to prenatal infection or other issues in the womb that by the time they’re born, the ratio is close to one to one. Guys also slower to develop physically than girls prenatally, which means they’re more likely to die if they are preemies due to underdeveloped lung or brain development. Women start out from the womb as superior beings. That's why guys don't have a chance.

Men are born daredevils

Unintentional injuries are the third leading cause of death in men, for women it’s only the sixth. You can blame it on biology: The primordial frontal lobes of the brain—which deal with responsibility and risk calculation—develop much more slowly in males than females. No wonder that they’re always more calculating.

Guys often take many more risks and long for thrills a women would avoid. It’s in their blood. It’s the way they were made. It's the way that they attract women - at least that's what they believe.

Men succumb to heart disease earlier

Heart disease is still the leading killer of both men and women, but men are more likely to develop it—and die from it—as early as their 30's and 40's. Women, on the other hand, typically develop heart disease 10 years later than men. They’re protected from it until menopause, since their bodies churn out estrogen, which helps keep their arteries strong and flexible.

Men lack strong social networks

Friends make good medicine: People with strong social connections have a 50% lower chance of dying than those with few social ties, according to a 2010 study at Brigham Young University. Men tend to hold in their stress and worries, while women tend to reach out and talk to others.

Men don’t take care of their health as well as women

Men are 24% less likely than women to have visited a doctor within the past year and are 22% more likely to skip out on cholesterol testing, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. In fact, more 28% of men don’t have a regular physician and about one in five didn’t even have health insurance in 2012.

Maybe we can blame it on the machismo of men,  so-called "John Wayne syndrome": “Men often deny illness; they minimize symptoms because they don’t want to go to a doctor and find out something is wrong.” 

Younger Dementia Patients Experience Different problems

While memory loss is thought to be a classical first sign of Alzheimer’s disease, some middle-aged people and younger seniors may initially experience different cognitive problems - such as trouble with language or problem solving, a large U.S. study suggests.

This can be a scary experience as most of us older workers have probably already seen our younger counterparts figure things out faster in the workforce.

In a new study, researchers reviewed data on early symptoms for almost 8,000 Alzheimer’s patients and found one in four people under age 60 had a chief complaint unrelated to memory, although memory was still the common problem overall.

Inside the brain, Alzheimer’s is associated with abnormal clumps known as amyloid plaques and tangled bundles of fibers, often called tau or tangles. Scientists suspect that the damage begins in the hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in memory. 

A new study reviewed neurological test results from a large U.S. database of Alzheimer’s patients to see whether the early symptoms people reported differed by age.

On average, patients were 75 years old when they first sought treatment for Alzheimer’s, though they ranged in age from 36 to 110. Most of them had mild to moderate forms of dementia. 

Among the patients who reported cognitive difficulties as their first symptoms, the proportion citing something other than memory (like confusion, getting lost, or not being able to find the right word) shrank with increasing age. One in five patients in their 60s cited difficulties unrelated to memory, but this dropped to one in 10 for people in their 70s. 

So what does this mean? That at first we're just confused but eventually we just give up and accept that we're useless and old? Perhaps another study will tell.

Understanding how Alzheimer’s or symptoms of dementia might surface in younger patients is crucial for diagnosing them sooner and starting treatment at a point when it can do the most good. Unfortunately,

the best available medicine today can only turn back the clock, reversing symptoms enough to give patients the same abilities they had up to a year earlier.

Right now with the medicines available you can’t slow the clock down, you can just reset it. It would be much better if we could take a pill to dial our memory back to repeat a year in our 60s - rather than in our 80s. Perhaps science will find a way.

You can download a free form for helping you see the warning signs of dementia on:

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