Is it true that women age more slowly than men, biologically speaking?

Molecular biomarkers show that women have, on average, a lower biological age than men, and women also live longer. But there is an important paradox here: towards the end of their lives, women are actually frailer and perform worse on physical tests than men of a comparable age. Living longer in biological terms therefore does not automatically mean spending those extra years in good health.

When it comes to brain health, women age less favourably in one respect: they have a demonstrably higher risk of Alzheimer's disease. How sex hormones, chromosomes and inflammatory processes interact in this is still being investigated. Whether women cope cognitively better or worse with brain pathology than men varies by life stage and disease stage, and no clear-cut answer has yet emerged.

The picture for muscles and bones is also mixed. Men have more muscle mass, but both sexes lose it as they age; the rate and the underlying mechanisms differ. For bones, sex differences in the density of the outer bone layer are already visible early in life, which may partly explain the different fracture risks in men and women. More long-term research is needed to understand this precisely.

Even the way in which excess weight accelerates the ageing process works differently in men and women. In men, the pathway to cardiovascular disease more often runs via accelerated biological ageing driven by body weight; in women, that accelerated ageing plays a larger role in the link between abdominal fat and metabolic problems. Finally, there are indications that individual organs age at different rates and that sex differences exist in this, but organ-specific clocks of this kind are still far from sufficiently developed for practical use.