Skip to main content
European Commission logo
Deutsch Deutsch
CORDIS - Forschungsergebnisse der EU
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary
Inhalt archiviert am 2024-06-18

The male-female health-mortality paradox

Ziel

"From the 1960s to the 1980s a common wisdom about differences between males and females in health and mortality emerged which was summarised by the well-known phrase ""women are sicker, but men die quicker"". Recently this wisdom has been increasingly questioned. Nevertheless, the general idea of a paradoxical relationship between health and mortality among women and men persists until today. The purpose of this project is to decisively advance the understanding of the paradox by demonstrating that the reverse relationship between sex on the one side and health and mortality on the other is not as paradoxical as it seems. We hypothesise that two factors are mainly responsible for causing this intuitive contradiction. First, the overall reversal in sex morbidity and sex mortality differentials occurs because conditions that figure importantly in morbidity are not very important in mortality, and vice versa. Second, it is very likely that longevity is directly related to the absolute number of life years in ill health. Thus, women show higher morbidity rates not because they are female but because they are the sex with higher life expectancy. We will test these hypotheses in a ""natural experiment"" by analysing the relationship between health and mortality among Catholic nuns and monks from Austria and Germany in comparison to women and men of the general population. Cloister studies have a long scientific tradition and provided path-breaking knowledge for human medicine and demography, including the applicant s research during the last decade. This project follows the line of this tradition and will investigate the male-female health-mortality paradox in a longitudinal setting that is as close as one can get to an ideal long-term experiment in humans."

Wissenschaftliches Gebiet

Not validated

Aufforderung zur Vorschlagseinreichung

ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Andere Projekte für diesen Aufruf anzeigen

Gastgebende Einrichtung

OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
EU-Beitrag
€ 999 999,14
Adresse
DR. IGNAZ SEIPEL-PLATZ 2
1010 Wien
Österreich

Auf der Karte ansehen

Region
Ostösterreich Wien Wien
Aktivitätstyp
Research Organisations
Hauptforscher
Marc Luy (Dr.)
Kontakt Verwaltung
Inga Freund (Ms.)
Links
Gesamtkosten
Keine Daten

Begünstigte (1)