CHICAGO: Being a man can be bad for your health — at any age — researchers say in a study. Long after the dangerous excesses of youth, men are more likely to die prematurely than women, they say.

The study, which spanned 20 countries, shows for the first time how much bigger the risk of premature death is for men than women, whatever their age. In the United States in 1998, for example, men up to the age of 50 were twice as likely to die than women. And the risk remained greater even for men who made it to their eighties and beyond.

Less surprisingly, the difference in death rates between the sexes was most extreme between the ages of 20 and 24, when three times more men died.

Researcher Randolph Nesse, from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in the US, told New Scientist magazine in a report on the findings that “being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death.”

His colleague Daniel Kruger said more than 375,000 lives could be saved in a single year in the US if men’s risk of dying was as low as women’s.

The US data was backed by death rates in countries as varied as Ireland, Australia, Russia, Singapore and El Salvador. Everywhere they looked, Nesse and Kruger found it was more perilous to be male. In Colombia — admittedly a country notorious for violence and homicide — men in their early twenties were five times more likely to die as women of the same age.

Yet the pattern was not merely the result of sudden violent death. It held for every major cause of death, from car crashes to heart attacks and murder. For external causes of death, such as accidents, the difference between the sexes was greatest for young adults. But the second largest disparity between men and women in the US occurred when they reached their sixties. At that point in their lives, men were 1.68 times as likely to die as women, mainly due to disease.

The gender gap had been on the rise since the 1940s, at least in the US, France, Japan and Sweden, where historical figures were available. The researchers suggest that improvements in public health and medicine may have benefited women more than men. For instance, far fewer women now died relatively young during childbirth.

Technological advances may have also made the world more dangerous for men, supplying them with more powerful guns and even faster cars. Sexual selection could also partly explain the differences, suggest Nesse and Kruger.

Competition for potential mates may be what drives men to take greater risks, with the result that men have evolved greater reproductive success at the expense of longevity. The same may be true for chimpanzees and even fruit flies, say the scientists.—dpa