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Content archived on 2024-06-18

The male-female health-mortality paradox

Objective

"From the 1960s to the 1980s a common wisdom about differences between males and females in health and mortality emerged which was summarised by the well-known phrase ""women are sicker, but men die quicker"". Recently this wisdom has been increasingly questioned. Nevertheless, the general idea of a paradoxical relationship between health and mortality among women and men persists until today. The purpose of this project is to decisively advance the understanding of the paradox by demonstrating that the reverse relationship between sex on the one side and health and mortality on the other is not as paradoxical as it seems. We hypothesise that two factors are mainly responsible for causing this intuitive contradiction. First, the overall reversal in sex morbidity and sex mortality differentials occurs because conditions that figure importantly in morbidity are not very important in mortality, and vice versa. Second, it is very likely that longevity is directly related to the absolute number of life years in ill health. Thus, women show higher morbidity rates not because they are female but because they are the sex with higher life expectancy. We will test these hypotheses in a ""natural experiment"" by analysing the relationship between health and mortality among Catholic nuns and monks from Austria and Germany in comparison to women and men of the general population. Cloister studies have a long scientific tradition and provided path-breaking knowledge for human medicine and demography, including the applicant s research during the last decade. This project follows the line of this tradition and will investigate the male-female health-mortality paradox in a longitudinal setting that is as close as one can get to an ideal long-term experiment in humans."

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

ERC-2010-StG_20091209
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant

Host institution

OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
EU contribution
€ 999 999,14
Address
DR. IGNAZ SEIPEL-PLATZ 2
1010 Wien
Austria

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Region
Ostösterreich Wien Wien
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

No data

Beneficiaries (1)

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