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Comment by deesep | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible that females have higher life expectancy than men because they menstruate?

It's going to be a lot of factors. Men are also a large majority of murder victims, are more likely to be homeless or in prison, represent a huge percentage of combat deaths, and are far more likely to be killed on the job. That's not to mention the higher likelyhood of substance abuse or involvement in automobile related fatalities. If we had a totally egalitarian society I wonder how wide the gap between men and women would be.

There's a life expectancy gap between sexes in most mammals

Most mammals have combat related deaths

All of the factors you list happen mostly before retirement age, yet even the life expectancy at age 65 is three years higher for women than men (86 years vs 83 years in the US pre-Covid). That suggests biological differences rather than socially-derived ones (though it doesn't prove anything, one could make a case of body degradation accruing pre-retirement).

People who donate blood regularly also seem to be healthier. A lot of confounding factors in this, though. It is not easy to tease out causality from a spaghetti of correlations.

The 'ancient' practice of bloodletting may have been discredited as a cure for most ailments, but perhaps more research will indicate that it does have some benefits. And I do think that blood donation is beneficial for both the giver and receiver.

People who donate blood regularly are screened for disease, so people who continue doing so have less disease by definition. And if they do have disease it's often identified earlier.

People doing some high risk activities are barred from donating blood completely, which again would have a positive effect on life-expectancy of those that donate.

It would be really hard to tease out causality here.

We (me & partner) have been playing with that idea for a while. It's like taking out the trash.

Would love to find any info on that. (Like past experiments, or find data on average life-span for regular blood-donors.)

So people were on to something with leaches...

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