Anxiety is the source of female longevity

Anastasia Yablonskaya, "Morning"

Anxiety and a sense of anxiety accompany the majority of residents of megacities through life. Moreover, there is a widespread point of view in everyday life that it is harmful to be nervous. Scientists have long argued this claim by saying that nerve cells do not regenerate. Later it was proved that this was not the case – restless citizens breathed a sigh of relief. The results of studies conducted by American scientists published recently shed light on the gender aspect of this problem. It turns out that stress affects the health of men and women in different ways. The researchers came to the conclusion that it is useful for the fairer sex to be nervous within limited limits – it prolongs their life, while anxiety has the opposite effect on men – it shortens their age.

A group of scientists from the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University analyzed the life expectancy statistics of thousands of people who lived in three nursing homes in Florida over the past 15 years. According to the study, women with an increased level of anxiety at the beginning of the experiment lived longer than others. Oddly enough, the change in the degree of anxiety over time did not affect their life expectancy. The opposite pattern was observed among men: representatives of the stronger sex, who were characterized by nervousness at the beginning of the study, died earlier than the rest.

"Our study shows that anxiety can play a protective role for women, possibly encouraging them to visit doctors more often than men," said one of the authors of the study, Qianping Zhang, an employee of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Cleveland Clinic. "Men, on the contrary, an increased sense of anxiety causes more harm," he added. According to study co-author Dr. Leo Pozuelo, "increased anxiety could make women be more active and attentive to their health." As Pozuelo notes, scientists "are not sure about the absolute relationship between anxiety and mortality, but the data obtained indicate the presence of gender differences." For a better understanding of the mechanisms of the influence of anxiety on the health of men and women, additional research is required.

Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru17.03.2008