General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If you think Feminism is not pro men, [View all]KitSileya
(4,035 posts)As has been stated previously, medical trials use mainly men as their subjects, and prior to advocacy by feminism, the medical community didn't focus on typically female diseases. For example, the great focus on research on breast cancer is relatively new, medically speaking. How much of medical research focuses on heart disease, diabetes, alzheimer, etc as especially female diseases, vs how it works for men. For heart disease, for example, it is a pretty recent discovery that the symptoms are different for men and women, and it is the symptoms typical for men that medical students learn to diagnose heart disease. Therefore, many women die of heart disease that may have been prevented, had they their symptoms been recognized for what they are. How many other causes of death have that same dichotomy of symptoms? We don't know, because the research is mainly done on men.
As for men dying sooner, that is something that research is focused on - and happy news for you, according to your link, men are living longer.
The death rates for males declined in 2009 from 2008 for age
groups under 1 year, 14, 1524, 2534, 5564, 6574, and 7584
years. For males, the death rate increased for age group 85 and over.
Death rates among females declined for the age groups under 1 year,
5564, 6574, 7584, and 85 years and over. For females, the death
rate increased for ages 2534 and 4554.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf p.6
That means that more men are dying above the age of 85. Yay.
Purely as a personal theory, I wonder whether the lower life expectancy for men is tied to why the birth rate of boys vs girls is 105 to 100. I know one theory for that is because boys, with their Y chromosome are more fragile than girls with their XX chromosomes. More redundancy on the genetic level, if something on one X doesn't work, they can perhaps shut that down and use the genes on the other chromosome instead - which may make them more resistant to disease. That means that now that women aren't dying in childbirth at horrific numbers, women live longer than men. It's interesting, but not something that is being neglected by the medical community.