Science says women's brains stay young longer than men's

In the long-standing debate about which bad is getting older, it has now been proven that women have the advantage over at least one point. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that women have a "lower brain metabolic age" than their male counterparts.

Clearly, this means that the brains of women appear younger than men of the same age (about four years on average), regardless of their chronological age. The study involved 205 participants, aged 20 to 82 years.

What kind of advantage could a younger brain confer on women? Findings from the study may help explain why women tend to perform better on cognitive tests as they get older, USU Manu Goyal, Principal Investigator at the Washington University School of Medicine, told US News. of Medicine in St. Louis. The findings also suggest that women may be better able to learn new skills and be creative later in life, Goyal told NPR.

A higher brain metabolism could also protect women against diseases such as Alzheimer's, Goyal suggested. However, some women experience a significant decline in glucose metabolism in the brain during menopause, making them more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease at an early stage, so the verdict has still not been reached.

Brain age results were uncovered when a team of researchers, including Goyal, from the University of Washington's Faculty of Medicine, decided to determine whether a person's age could be properly determined by its cerebral metabolic activity. The team examined participants to determine the amount of oxygen and glucose used in different parts of their brains. The levels were then used to determine the age of the people participating in the study and, in most cases, the computer was calculated correctly.

But the answers were not always accurate – and when the researchers separated the errors by bad, they found that women's brains appeared on average four years younger than their actual age. This led researchers to conclude that women's brains were aging more slowly than men's brains.

Is it hormones? Genetic? Is this one of the reasons why women often survive men? The researchers are not quite sure.

But women, the next time someone asks you your age and you want to falsify it about four years less, it seems like science is on your side.