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Comment by wedn3sday | Hacker News Reader

This may go part of the way to explaining why women have a longer life span then men, they're constantly having to manufacture new blood. Men only have to create new blood if they donate or suffer some injury, but women's bodies are generating new blood all the time.

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Everyone generates new blood all the time. There's nothing gender specific about this. Our blood cells are completely replaced over a cycle of something like 4 months.

And this study is about plasma and albumin specifically.

i think OP is referring to the monthly blood loss women experience.

There's some research (which I won't dig up at the moment; google "iron longevity" for a start) indicating that it's actually iron/heme which is bad. Women can get rid of it, at least while their fertility lasts. Men can't.

Men can't... unless they donate whole blood regularly, which is a pretty easy way to reduce iron load.

(And, in fact, donating blood regularly or even more often than usually recommended is the standard treatment for hemochromatosis, an inherited condition where too much iron is retained.)

Except that increased female longevity is a trend that carries through many different mammal species. [0] Not all mammals menstruate in the same manner as humans. They all have a menstrual cycle, but many have a thin menstrual lining that's simple reabsorbed by the body rather than being shed in the form of menses.

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[0]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/females-live-longe....

I always assumed this was in part related to socio-economic reasons (men on average do jobs with much higher death rates) as well as the effects of pregnancy, where the mothers body can be healed when pregnant due to migration of stem cells. Wild speculation on that last one impacting the life span, but there is evidence for it.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21185-fetus-donates-s...

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