Testosterone and Life Span or Why Women Live Longer than Men: A Hypothesis

Women around the world live longer than men. The question of why this is happening is very interesting, but still unresolved in gerontology. There are a number of proposals to explain the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, but there are no clearly confirmed or refuted ones among them. This is probably due to the fact that it is extremely difficult to organize the testing of such hypotheses for Homo sapiens, and the available data on animals are often contradictory and their results cannot be fully transferred to humans. In the article, we tried to identify one of the possible mechanisms leading to sex differences in life expectancy in the human population. The depressing effect of testosterone on the immune system of women is much weaker than on the immune system of men. The concentration of testosterone in the blood of men is 10–18 times higher than that of women, and, after the onset of menopause, the already low concentration of testosterone in women drops by another 25–50%. The immune system of men weakens with age to a greater extent, which leads to an increased incidence of infectious, oncological, and other immune-dependent pathologies, which just reduces the minimal, middle, and maximum life span of men compared with women.