In up to 60% of cases, females have been outliving males across Europe because of smoking, researchers revealed in the journal Tobacco Control. For the last couple of hundred years experts have been arguing about why women have been surviving for longer than men in Europe.
Some say females are biologically designed to live longer, while others suggest that as women go to the doctors more they probably get treated or cured from diseases more often. However, the authors found that trends vary too widely throughout the continent for such a simple picture – the variables are far more complex.
Scientists from the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Glasgow, UK, aimed to find out what drove these gender gaps in deaths in more detail.
They gathered data from WHO (World Health Organization) on male and female death rates around the year 2005 in 30 European nations and focused on fatalities linked to smoking, drinking, and all causes.
Deaths associated with regular smoking included stroke, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), respiratory tract cancer and coronary artery disease. Alcohol-linked deaths included chronic liver disease, alcohol psychosis and violence, and throat and gullet cancers.
A good spread of 30 European countries were covered in the study, including several nations in Western and Eastern Europe, Cyprus, Malta, Greece, Iceland, and Scandinavia (not Russia).
They then worked out the proportion of the male vs. female death rate discrepancies linked to alcohol and smoking in all 30 nations by dividing the gender gap for each cause of death by the gender gap for all causes.
As expected, deaths from all causes were higher for males than females. However, the size of the gap varied significantly – from 188 per 100,000 of the population annually in Iceland to 942 in Ukraine.
The majority of nations with a gender gap higher than 400 per 100,000 were in Eastern Europe. However, Portugal, Finland, France, Spain and Belgium had the largest gaps.
The discrepancy in alcohol-related deaths ranged from Iceland with 29 per 100,000 to Lithuania with 253 per 100,000.
Eastern European countries had notably high alcohol-related deaths. Eastern European women had considerably higher alcohol-related deaths than females in other parts of Europe. The overall proportion of alcohol-related deaths ranged from 20% to 30%.
Deaths caused by smoking were huge when compared to alcohol-related deaths, the authors reported, regardless of how high deaths attributed to alcohol might be.
Male death rates caused by smoking ranged from 495 per 100,000 in Ukraine to 97 in Iceland.
With the exception of France, Portugal and Denmark, smoking was behind 40% to 60% of the gender gap in all nations (Malta 74%).
The authors wrote:
“Profound changes in the population level of smoking and in the magnitude of the gender gap in smoking should contribute to smaller gender differences in mortality in the coming decades.
However, the extent to which this is realised will depend on the ways in which other health risk behaviors are patterned by gender.”
“Contribution of smoking-related and alcohol-related deaths to the gender gap in mortality: evidence from 30 European countries”
Gerry McCartney, Lamia Mahmood, Alastair H Leyland, G David Batty, Kate Hunt
Tob Control doi:10.1136/tc.2010.037929
Written by Christian Nordqvist
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