Generally speaking, one should expect greater disability and disease in later life to correlate with greater mortality. Yet in many mammalian species, including our own, males die younger and females exhibit greater frailty while living longer. Biology is complicated! Here, researchers single out for attention the age-related dysfunction of the immune system that leads to a growing state of unresolved, constant inflammatory signaling. This state of inflammaging is thought to differ in women versus men, and may be one of the more important contributions to the observed sex-specific differences in outcomes.
Aging is a dynamic process that requires a continuous response and adaptation to internal and external stimuli over the life course. This eventually results in people aging differently and women aging differently than men. The "gender paradox" describes how women experience greater longevity than men, although linked with higher rates of disability and poor health status. Recently, the concept of frailty has been incorporated into this paradox giving rise to the "sex-frailty paradox" which describes how women are frailer because they manifest worse health status but, at the same time, appear less susceptible to death than men of the same age. However, very little is known about the biological roots of this sex-related difference in frailty.
Inflamm-aging, the chronic low-grade inflammatory state associated with age, plays a key pathophysiological role in several age-related diseases/conditions, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), for which women have a higher lifetime risk than men. Interestingly, inflamm-aging develops at a different rate in women compared to men, with features that could play a critical role in the development of AD in women. According to this view, a continuum between aging and age-related diseases that probably lacks clear boundaries can be envisioned in which several shared biological mechanisms that progress at different pace may lead to different aging trajectories in women than in men.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exger.2024.112619
View the full article at FightAging
