Health benefits of being a woman

 BY DR. SYLVESTER IKHISEMOJIE 

   

 

 

Dr. Sylvester Ikhisemojie
| credits: File copy

Women are maternal by nature and that instinct becomes very strong in the child-bearing years and beyond. As a part of this complex, women are also territorial and are disposed to taking care of the health needs of their homes. Not only is the average woman more knowledgeable about health issues than men of similar educational status, they are also more willing to visit the hospital when problems develop with the result that when they have ailments, detection and treatment occur earlier than in men and with better results. The woman goes to the hospital at the first time of trouble with her health. She will take the sick children there as well sometimes even before her husband is aware. Similarly, she also has to drag even her husband to seek hospital attention. Men are more likely to hide behind a toga of machismo which has nothing in reality to do with the level of one’s fitness. Accordingly, women are more receptive of the doctor’s advice and more likely to accept to conduct laboratory tests.

In many different countries, women have a better life expectancy than men have. Scientists are not very certain why this discrepancy exists but women have a much reduced rate of heart diseases than men have and as these increasingly become important factors in causing disease and death around the world, it is a discrepancy that is likely to endure. Besides that, many men within the productive age from 25 to 40 years are also several more times as likely to die violently as women are. In all the war-torn areas of the world, the men suffer a disproportionate number of casualties. Even in peacetime, men in this age group are more likely to suffer from injury and death from violence. These factors range from farmland accidents to road traffic injuries. They are also the usual victims of spontaneous acts of violence which range from local area riots to armed robbery and other mobilised acts of violence. These cause more gender related injuries and deaths that overwhelmingly favour women.

Women also are known to have better endurance in the face of adversity. Pain, for example, is one aspect of our lives in which women significantly edge men and the usual notion that men bear pain with unflinching strength is not supported by research. Rather, it is the women who are known to have a much higher pain threshold than men. This means that it takes a lot more effort to get pain to register in a woman whereas that effort is so much less in men. The agony of child-bearing is believed to contribute to this inner strength and over many years, it helps the woman cope better with painful adversity than the man.

Another common killer known to man is the head and neck cancers which include cancers in the mouth, pharynx and oesophagus. These are more common ailments in men than in women and this is partly because of the male lifestyle which is known to encourage the development of these cancers. This is made possible by the vastly superior numbers of male cigarette smokers than female ones and also the male advantage over the female in alcohol intake. In 2015 in the United States for example, it is being estimated that two and a half times more men than women will develop oral and pharyngeal cancer. Cancers of the oesophagus will afflict eight times as many men as women in the same period. These are frightening statistics that clearly give the women cause to cheer. The figures could even be more stark in our sub-region if they were available because culturally, women consume even less alcohol than their Western counterparts while the smoking habit is a stubbornly minority female engagement. So because more men than women smoke and drink alcohol, they also develop these cancers in much larger numbers.

Lifestyle differences between men and women also have a bearing on the health status of both. Men who tend to gain weight and look more like “the apple”, thus packing loads of fat around the upper part of the body and the abdomen are more prone to heart and vascular diseases. They suffer more frequently from stroke and diabetes and heart disease as a result of all those changes in contradistinction to the women who gain weight but look more like the “pear”. These people tend to have a healthier life and are much less prone to developing cardiovascular diseases. That results from the fact that such fat is located away from the heart. The fat is generally deposited around the hips and the thighs. Women thus have less of a tendency to accumulate such harmful fat than men generally do. It is now known that “belly fat” is not innocent: it is metabolically active and produces hormones which are metabolically active in the body. They cause a chain reaction of events that lead to a higher level of tissue inflammation and insulin resistance which can be grave in men but much less so in women.

Women in their reproductive years produce high levels of oestrogen. That female hormone is known to promote the production of the high density cholesterol, the good cholesterol, which helps keep heart disease at bay by discouraging the development of plaques in the heart and blood vessels. Oestrogen production falls off after the menopause and as this happens, the level of high density cholesterol also falls with the result that women could in theory become as prone to cardiovascular disease as men are. However, women who maintain a healthy and balanced diet do not seem to develop this liability. Most importantly though, is the fact that even when they are likely to become prone to these sort of problems, they typically lag some 10 to 15 years behind their male counterparts.

Many people will acknowledge that a woman’s sense of smell is far sharper than a man’s. This has a solid basis in science where the number of cells in the olfactory region of the brain, the centre responsible for mediating the sense of smell, is about 50 percent more than you would find in a man. This superiority is not merely a numbers game but it is relevant because the more acute sense of smell in a woman has saved many households from the trauma of domestic fires and from the agonising life that may follow the consumption of poisons. Those domestic fires are frequently caused in our homes by cooking gas and often by kerosene explosion. Women have been credited with preventing even more disasters than we are seeing and thus saving lives. That sense of smell is also speculated to help mothers in detecting unpleasant odours that could be related to lurking infections which leads women to take preventive action that avoids disease and save lives. Men who are less endowed in terms of this ability would probably consume such products with predictably sad consequences.

One of the leading causes of death in the world today is alcoholism. Women are far less likely than men to become alcoholics. Women frequently weep or even cry openly in reaction to illness, abuse, deprivation and bereavement. Men, on the other hand, tend to find solace in alcohol. By so doing, they suppress their social inhibitions and may thus engage in risky behaviour with a heightened risk of sustaining injury or death. When an agitated or bereaved man drinks alcohol, he is likely to have lost his sense of sobriety and would drive or operate machinery regardless. He thus becomes a risk to himself and to others. Men are known by research to respond more pleasantly to alcohol intake than women are and this response is measured by the quantity of dopamine released in the brain. Dopamine is a transmitter within the connections in the brain that is so important to the regulation of excitement and sadness. Men prefer to enjoy the former and that’s why they are so at risk of developing an addiction to it. Women by contrast, have a more muted response to alcohol intake and are thus at less risk for an addiction problem. They thus find open weeping, crying and even grieving as a more useful emotional outlet than alcohol abuse. As a result, the more open emotional display used by women is associated with a longer life expectancy than it is for men. When men are bereaved, they typically live for several more years and die if they do not remarry. Women, by contrast, can endure even a quarter of a century more after the loss of a spouse.

Therefore, as a result of what we know now about our women, let us invite them without hindrance or shame to continue doing what they have done for generations and thus provide for their husbands while protecting their young in all the ways that they have been equipped to do. This is a panacea for individual, family and ultimately, for our national health.

Ask the doctor