Cigarette use and the narrowing sex differential in mortality

摘要

After widening for nearly 100 years, the sex differential in mortality has begun to narrow over the last decade or two in many high-income Western countries. A brief and general history of the sex differential in mortality begins in preindustrial societies, where few differences existed in male and female life expectancy in large part because of the poor conditions experienced by women during adolescence and young adulthood (Vallin 1991). By the 1880s in some early-industrializing countries and byWorld War I in most other industrializing countries, the female advantage began its steady growth (Stolnitz 1957). The upward trend in the female advantage accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s, with middle-aged males unexpectedly experiencing rising death rates from coronary heart disease and females at all ages and for nearly all causes experiencing falling death rates (Waldron 1995). After 1968, coronary heart disease mortality fell for men, though more slowly than for women (Wingard 1984), and higher rates of death involving traffic accidents and lung cancer among men further contributed to the continued growth in the sex differential (Lopez 1983). Only in the 1990s did it become apparent that this century-long trend toward an increasing female advantage in mortality had started to reverse.