Editor’s Note: Starre Vartan is the author of “.Strong sex: Science teaches women’s physical strength. This will be released on July 15th.
Those who lived through Irish potato hunger, enslavement of Trinidad and Icelandic measles epidemics all have something in common.
That’s because, as I discovered while researching for my new book, The Stronger Sex, the female body is made for resilience and longevity.
Despite having more complex reproductive organs and the burdens that accompany them, sometimes fatal functions (menstrual period, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding), women’s bodies tend to last longer for men’s bodies. And that’s true, even though girls in many parts of the world can have fewer resources, such as food and medical care, than boys.
In extreme circumstances, the woman is true and was discovered when she analyzed survival data in seven historical groups experiencing hunger, epidemics and enslavement, as she is now an associate professor of demographics at the University of Italy, Padua University.
Under these brutal circumstances, women lived long men of almost all ages and places in the “high austerity” group that stood up against hunger in Ukraine, Ireland and Sweden. Enslavement of Trinidad. A 2018 survey published in the journal PNAS shows that the epidemic of measles in Iceland is. Even newborns in these settings had higher survival rates than newborn boys. This is a hint that female survival advantages are rooted in biology.
The intrinsic strength of a woman also manifests where women experience extreme physical stress overall. “Analyzing empirical data shows that men have higher mortality rates than women because of modern people.
Recognizing and building on these gender-based differences can help change the way we approach healthcare, including cancer and vaccine protocol treatment.
Female chromosomes and hormones
People assigned females at birth have two X chromosomes, with basic advantages over XY, and chromosome males are at birth. This is because the X chromosome is much larger and contains about 10 times more genes. Therefore, the defense system is very strong and diverse, as the female body has access to a wider range of immune genes. As he wrote about the benefits of the book book about XX chromosome, “Women evolved immunologically into men,” said Dr. Sharon Moarem, a neurobiologist and evolutionary biologist. Viruses and bacteria are constantly mutated, making the immune system that can adapt quickly is more resilient.
High estrogens in the female body generally also confer a variety of immune benefits.
As a result, female mammals, including humans, have a more equipped immune system in both innate generalized and adaptive professional responses. The female body also has a higher count of active neutrophils, the most common type of white blood cells that fight infection.
Scientists also discovered that female bodies have more robust B-cell activity. This is the action of leukocytes that adapt to combat viruses and bacteria. This benefit can be partly due to estrogen, and researchers are trying to tear things that are mediated by hormones, those that are affected by genes, and those that can be attributed to other causes.
Researchers say women produce more target antibodies to combat infectious diseases, retain longer immunological memories to combat them, and are proficient at responding to future infectious diseases. All this leads to “a very well-known phenomenon in which men tend to suffer from more illnesses than women.”
Because women’s bodies provide stronger immune defenses, there is generally a stronger vaccine-viral response, increasing their ability to combat sepsis and lowering the risk of some cancers. However, the drawback of this powerful system is that women get more autoimmune diseases than men. Women are also more likely to live with chronic illnesses after surviving the disease that would have killed the male body.
Testosterone also appears to be immunocompromised, with men having more hormones than women. Zuk said in early experiments the scientists determined that “it could potentially castrate male animals, and it would improve their immunity, or inject female animals with testosterone, which would worsen immunity.”
why? Testosterone is “young living and dying violently,” Zuk said, potentially enabling male animals to achieve greater reproductive success. Part of the immune benefits of women can be immune detrimental to men, and although it is acceptable that hormones affect immunity, it determines how much of an ongoing research question is.
Physiology and Culture
Some scientists argue that lifestyle and culture lead to important parts of the shortcomings of male longevity. As a population, men tend to smoke more, drink more alcohol and engage in high-risk activities, while men tend to exclude most women from more physically dangerous jobs.
Studies that focus on what happens when women adopt some of the unhealthy habits traditionally likely among male populations, such as smoking, show that women live longer than men, Zarri said. “There were still differences in mortality rates in groups where men and women had the same lifestyle. Women had a higher life expectancy than men.”
New research shows that women’s benefits can be caused by more than genetic and hormonal factors. It can also be seen in the structure of a woman’s body.
At North Carolina State University, a team led by microbial ecologist Erin McKenney and forensic anthropologist Amanda Hale conducted a groundbreaking study to measure the length of a corpse’s small intestine for the first time since 1885.
The team found that women’s small intestines are significantly longer than men’s. This is the advantage that women can extract more nutrients from the same amount of food.
This finding, published in Peerj’s journal in a 2023 paper, could be explained by extra demands on the female body throughout human history.
This could be an important part of the idea that, according to Hale, “female buffering hypothesis” (women’s biology has evolved to withstand environmental and physiological stress.
Traditional medical research has long ignored the complexity of women’s bodies. These genome and physiological functions are better studied and understood, so the drivers behind the strength and resilience of the female body will focus. This knowledge informs all bodies of more targeted treatments for infection and immunity.
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