THE world’s oldest person – a Japanese woman – died last Tuesday. She was 119 years old and reports say she had set 120 years as her target. She got close.

Reports also stated that Japan has over 100,000 citizens over the age of 100 years and that 80 per cent are women, which brings the whole question of women’s longevity into focus.

Across the globe, women outlive men and over the past 30 years women have been living longer. Scientists feel that estrogen in women helps to combat such conditions as heart disease, while cardio-vascular illness is a chief cause of mortality among men.

The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) tells us that, “In more developed countries, the average life expectancy at birth is 79 years for women, 72 years for men.”

However, in less developed countries where “maternal mortality reduces the difference in longevity,” women can still expect to live longer – 66 years as compared to 63 years for men.

Interestingly, the life-expectancy gap in developed countries such as the US “rose throughout the last century.” And researchers say that this is in part due to lifestyle choices, such as the fact that men are more likely to smoke and take risks, which open them to injuries that may be life-threatening.

Other behavioural factors which increase longevity in women, according to one study, are simply that women are more likely to see a doctor when they feel ill and are more inclined to adjust their diet and exercise regimen in their efforts to stay healthy.

However, from birth the disparity exists and David Robson of the BBC put a personal twist on it when he said, “As soon as I was born I was already destined to die earlier than half the babies in my maternity ward – a curse that I can do little to avoid. The reason? My sex. Simply due to the fact that I am male, I can be expected to die around three years earlier than a woman born on the same day.”

While poverty accounts for increased mortality in poorer countries, women still live longer than men and female babies have a higher survival rate than males, leading researchers to look beyond environmental, social and behavioural factors.

For as the Robson report says, “The survival advantage of women is seen in every country, in every year, for which reliable records exist.”

In Guyana, the female mortality rate continues to be lower than that of males – 24.7 (deaths per 1,000 births in 2020) as compared with 32.0 in males.

And because this trend is so pronounced, scientists have yet been driven to ask the question, why? Giving rise to the emerging field of ‘geroscence’ or the study of aging.

Researchers are now discovering that, along with the fact that women have stronger immune systems than men, there are other biological and genetic factors behind the longevity gap, which makes the answer to the question more complicated than it may at first seem.

For instance, one study by Nir Barzilai, Director of the Institute of Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, showed that the protein levels in a man changed at a higher rate than in a woman. “Female biology seems to be more stable than male,” Barzai said.

Another study found that men lose antibody-producing B cells in their blood after the age of 65, while women do not experience the same loss and “men experienced greater blood inflammation as they aged, a factor that is associated with serious COVID-19.”

But what about a ‘divine’ dictate which may simply have determined that because of our roles as nurturers, minders and, in particular, procreators, women need to ‘stick around’ longer?