Monastery study

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German-Austrian monastery study
German-Austrian monastery study
Logo of the German-Austrian monastery study
Category: Research project
Carrier: Austrian Academy of Sciences
Seat of the wearer: Vienna
Facility location: Vienna
Type of research: Population research
Basic funding: European Research Council
Management: Marc Luy
Homepage: www.cloisterstudy.eu

The monastery study , also known as the Cloister Study , is a meta-analysis and has become an international term in connection with the significant disparity in the life expectancy of women and men. From the conclusions, biological factors affecting excess mortality in men can be largely excluded.

The study is continuously expanded. In 2010, the European Research Council made funding available for further research into this imbalance (ERC Project No. 262663).

introduction

The stereotype : "It's their own fault if they die earlier" has become a common social consensus when it comes to life expectancy. A Zeit -Article put this into the room, whereupon the General Association of the German Insurance Industry published a counter position: “And therefore it is also obvious to you that men because of their self-inflicted short life, as a result of which they have an average of four to five years draw a shorter pension, can easily subsidize the longer life expectancy of women. Somehow this is reminiscent of the classic distribution of roles in care marriage - only without marriage. "

Between the 1960s and 1970s, a general view of gender differences in health and mortality emerged , which was summarized in the well-known phrase "Women are sicker, but men die quicker". In recent times this view has been increasingly called into question. Nevertheless, the idea of ​​a paradoxical relationship between the morbidity and mortality of women and men has survived to this day.

origin

In 1998, the population scientist Marc Luy attracted the attention of experts with his diploma thesis on mortality in Bavarian women's and men's monasteries . Submitted to the young scientist competition of the German Foundation for World Population and the German Society for Population Science , the jury clearly preferred the diploma thesis to the dissertations that were also submitted. In 2002, the work under the title Why women live longer was taken over into the inventory of the Federal Institute for Population Research.

Based on the significantly higher life expectancy of monks in comparison with men in the general population, Luy showed in a retrospective study that, under the appropriate conditions, the life expectancy of men almost approaches that of women.

Working hypothesis

If biological factors that cannot be influenced play a significant role in life expectancy, there should be no gender-specific differences between the monastery and the general population. But if behavior and the environment , i.e. factors that can be influenced by humans, play a role, nuns and monks should have similarly long life expectancies.

record

Monastery church of the Archabbey of St. Ottilien

In total, the data set collected manually and directly on site in the first study in 1996 and 1997 includes eleven Bavarian monasteries with 11,624 order members , including 6,154 nuns and 5,470 monks. Data were collected from index cards and existing computer files , which were compared with mortality tables for the general population. In 2005 the data was expanded to include another monastery outside of Bavaria, which expanded the data set to 11,980 order members, 6,199 nuns and 5,781 monks.

Participating monasteries

English Misses in Bamberg and Würzburg, Sisters of Charity of the Holy Cross in Gemünden am Main, Carmelites in Bamberg, Archabbey of the Mission Benedictines in St. Ottilien, Dominican Sisters of St. Katharina v. Siena from Oakford / Natal in Neustadt am Main, Augustinians in Würzburg, rite sisters in Würzburg, St. Francis sisters in Vierzehnheiligen, servants of St. Jesus' childhood in Oberzell am Main, Münsterschwarzach Benedictine Abbey . In 2005 the Cistercian Abbey of Marienstatt was added.

Smoking behavior

The majority of studies on gender mortality differences focus on smoking behavior. The significantly higher mortality in men from lung cancer and heart failure suggests that this factor is likely to be the largest contributor to the spread of male excess mortality.

In a study, with the help of data from 22 industrialized countries, the hypothesis was checked that equality between men and women leads to an increased proportion of women who smoke and work, and thus to increased female mortality, which has been confirmed. Further studies found that smoking leads to a higher risk of mortality in young adult men than in women of the same age. Analysis of population samples found that smoking is a risk factor for both sexes, but to a greater extent for men.

Stressfulness

For women and men, different social and occupational stresses are considered to be the trigger for the unequal life expectancy in cardiovascular diseases . The main cause is suspected to be the so-called (behavioral) "type A", which is often found in men, as it is related to employment and women are less exposed to the associated stress due to a lower proportion of the working population. This type is characterized by intense effort to perform, (struggle for) competitiveness , easily provocative impatience , (chronic) lack of time, hectic pace that is expressed through gestures and language , professional overload as well as excessive psychodynamics and aversion . On the other hand, bringing up children should not generate less stress than work.

marital status

It is certain that married people survive much better than unmarried people. Married men have a significantly lower mortality compared to all other family classes, single men compared to widowed and divorced persons . For the same reasons, there is also a lower mortality among women. The loss of a spouse has more extreme consequences for men than for women. A Finnish study of over 1.5 million married people shows that losing a spouse results in a relative increase in mortality that is more than twice as high for men as for women.

According to the “protection theory”, the marital status effect is attributed to the fact that married people lead a more orderly life, eat more regularly and maintain a healthier lifestyle than single people . In addition, there is usually greater emotional balance . On the other hand, there is the “selection hypothesis”, according to which healthier people have greater chances of getting married and consequently the unmarried population consists to a greater extent of people with health problems. But it contradicts the higher mortality risk of the widowed and divorced, who were also once married, compared to the married. It would also be possible for a (previously unnamed) third factor that affects both marital status and health to exist.

Unequal selection through both world wars

It is assumed that even the exclusion of war deaths from the First and Second World Wars from the official statistics does not allow a war-independent calculation of mortality risks because war events influence the survival probability of women and men in different ways. In women, there are changes in mortality during and immediately after the two world wars due to poor diet, hygiene, medical care and a few other factors. Soldiers on the front lines are usually the healthier men, but they are at significant risk of violent death. During the Second World War, Germany lost up to half of the individual birth cohorts.

In the post-war era, men tend to die earlier. Injuries, psychological stress, malnutrition or other health hazards shorten the life expectancy of survivors. However, since these men reach 50 and more years of life and only then increasingly die, this change in the health situation of those affected by the war does not have an effect immediately after the end of the war. This would also explain why the excess mortality of men did not increase in 1950, but only from 1960; Statistically clouded by increased immigration .

In a study of the Germans who survived both World Wars, it was found that the male adolescents at the end of the war later had a significantly higher mortality in the middle age groups. This is not evident in German women. Something similar can be observed, but not to the same extent, in the other warring countries of both world wars. This is explained by the fact that the blood vessel structures are impaired by malnutrition , but this only has an impact in the age groups in which cardiovascular diseases are the most common cause of death. This affects young people most at the end of the war, as undernourishment in the last years of growth cannot be compensated for later, as is the case with smaller children. That this only affects men is explained by the ability of women to store more fat.

Missionaries

One of the systematic questions was whether the missionary service has an influence on life expectancy and whether one has to evaluate those who work in the missionary service. That was not the case; especially healthy nuns and monks were chosen for missionary work. About 40% of the monks during the observation period went on missions, but only about 20% of the nuns, with monks completing an average of 30 and nuns an average of 25 mission years before they returned to the mother house .

Results

According to the results, nuns and women of the general population live almost equally long, closely followed by monks, who have an average life expectancy of one to two years shorter than both groups of women. Well behind are men of the general population, who live an average of six years less than nuns and women of the general population and up to four and a half years less than monks.

Study extension

Luy was subsequently confronted with the argument that monks are not exposed to everyday risks and that conclusions about the general population are not permissible.

Unnatural death

In another publication, expanded to include international data, Luy goes into greater detail on exogenous causes of death . The following are described under the accidental mortality of the monks: Protection of the monastery walls or typical male risk behavior? unexpectedly frequent causes of death such as traffic accidents , high-risk sports , violent crimes and suicides that do not stop at monks. The mortality of monks does not differ from that of the general male population even for external causes. The “monastery effect”, however, comes into its own with nuns - after all, the accidental mortality among nuns is even lower than the already low accidental mortality in the general female population.

Military service and nicotine use

Field service for German soldiers, June 1941

Monks were allowed to smoke in the monastery from 1945. In contrast to nuns, monks had to do military service and, if they survived it, came back to their monasteries partly dependent on nicotine from war or captivity . Since monks did not want to use weapons against other people, they were mostly used close to the front in pastoral care or looking after the wounded . In order not to have to forbid the monks, who were psychologically burdened by the aftermath of the war, from the addiction they had acquired during the war , it was left at that and it was allowed to continue smoking in monasteries, which decades later had little effect on life expectancy.

In the first half of the 20th century , a total of 34.3% of the monks doing military service fell.

Mortality among nuns

Actually, nuns should live longer compared to women in the general group, which is not the case. Based on empirical data, it is assumed that employment and childlessness can influence the mortality of nuns.

The triggers or risk factors for circulatory diseases (the cause of most health-related deaths) are generally smoking, obesity , lack of exercise and stress in certain occupations and activities. While full employment is common for nuns into old age, women in the general population benefit from earlier retirement and less work stress from more frequent housewife work . Various studies have already shown that work-related stress often has an even more negative impact on health in women than in men.

In terms of survival, it turned out that West German housewives had by far the lowest mortality rate and that at the age of 40 they could expect a further 43.8 years of life. Motherhood also has a positive effect . If you have at least one child, you can count on 42.3 more years. The losers due to higher than average mortality are working and childless women who at the age of 40 have an expected distant life expectancy of 39.2 years. Employment and childlessness occur frequently among women in the general population, and exclusively combined among nuns.

Monastery life offers nuns protection from accidents, injuries, poisoning , violent crimes and suicides. However, cancer, especially breast cancer , is more common than in the general population - despite the smoking ban . Exception: cervical cancer . Science assumes that this is caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV). The mode of transmission is often smear or contact infection during sexual intercourse .

German-Austrian monastery study

In 2010, the European Research Council awarded a sponsorship prize worth up to two million euros to Marc Luy's research group. The aim is to expand the research on the reasons for excess mortality in men and to extend the monastery study to Austria.

The first survey (wave 1) was carried out between July and December 2012. The first data and methodological report on wave 1 was published in June 2014. The recording of the second wave was completed in 2015.

reception

  • Eckart von Hirschhausen treats the monastery study in a chapter of his book The liver grows with its tasks
  • Ralf Bönt processed the findings of the monastery study in his book The Dishonored Sex: A Necessary Manifesto for Men

literature

  • Angela Wiedemann, Anja Marcher, Christian Wegner-Siegmundt, Paola Di Giulio, Marc Luy : The health survey of the monastery study . Data and methods to report shaft 1 (=  research report . No. 37 ). Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences , Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-7001-7662-6 ( oeaw.ac.at [PDF; 1,3 MB ; accessed on January 14, 2006]).
  • Marc Luy, Christian Wegner: Live slowly, die old - gender-specific mortality research with the monastery study . In: Journal of Gynecological Endocrinology . tape 21 , no. 4 , 2011, ISSN  1997-6690 , DNB  988156288 , p. 18 ( PDF; 327 kB (PDF) [accessed on February 9, 2012]).
  • Marc Luy: Hella Ehlers, Heike Kahlert , Gabriele Linke, Dorit Raffel, Beate Rudlof, Heike Trappe (eds.): Gender difference - and no end? Social sciences and humanities contributions to gender research . 1st edition. tape 8 . LIT Verlag, Berlin / Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-8258-1647-6 , 10 years monastery study - knowledge gained and open questions about the causes of the different life expectancy of women and men, p. 251–273 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  • Marc Luy: Paul-Hermann Gruner , Eckhard Kuhla (ed.): Liberation movement for men . On the way to gender democracy. Essays and analyzes. 1st edition. Psychosozial-Verlag , Giessen 2009, ISBN 978-3-8379-2003-1 , Why Monks Live Longer - Men and Mortality: Findings from Ten Years of Monastery Study, p. 259–276 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  • Marc Luy: Why do women live longer - or why men die earlier? On the causes and development of the gender difference in life expectancy. In: Traditio et Innovatio . tape 13 , no. 1 , 2008, ISSN  1432-1513 , DNB  018540627 , p. 44–46 ( PDF; 512 kB (PDF) [accessed February 9, 2012]).
  • Marc Luy: Do women live longer or do men die earlier? In: Public Health Forum . tape 14 , no. 50 , 2006, p. 18–20 ( PDF; 2.9 kB (PDF) [accessed February 9, 2012]).
  • Marc Luy: Jochen Geppert, Jutta Kühl (eds.): Gender and life expectancy . Gender competent - contributions from the Gender Competence Center. tape 2 . Kleine Verlag, Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 978-3-89370-414-9 , Causes of Male Excessive Mortality: A Study of the Mortality of Nuns and Monks, p. 36-76 .
  • Marc Luy : Mortality Analysis in the Field of Historical Demography . The creation of period life tables using the growth balance method and statistical test procedures. In: Series of publications by the Federal Institute for Population Research . tape 34 . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften , Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-531-14482-0 (Zugl. Rostock, Univ., Diss., 2004.).
  • Marc Luy : Causes of Male Excess Mortality: Insights from Cloistered Populations . In: Population and Development Review . Vol. 29, No. 4 , 2003, p. 647-676 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1728-4457.2003.00647.x (English).

(Abstract)

Lectures

  • Past and future directions of the German-Austrian “Cloister Study”. Rush University Medical Center , Chicago, USA, August 23, 2011. (Marc Luy)
  • Sex differences in health and mortality: obtained results and future aims of the "cloister study". 23rd REVES Meeting, Paris, France, May 25, 2011. (Marc Luy)
  • Aging in an aged society: experiences and attitudes of catholic order members towards population aging and older people. Poster presentation at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA), Washington, DC, USA, March 31, 2011. (Marc Luy, Priska Flandorfer)
  • The biological force behind excess male external cause mortality: an analysis of unnatural deaths among catholic order members. Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA), Dallas, USA, April 15, 2010. (Marc Luy)
  • Why do women live longer than men? Findings from the Cloister Study. Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) 2008, Barcelona, ​​Spain, July 22, 2008. (Marc Luy)
  • Do women live longer or do men die earlier? Findings from the Cloister Study. University of Michigan , Department of Social Research, Ann Arbor, USA, March 27, 2007. (Marc Luy)
  • Behavior or biology? An answer to the question of male excess mortality by comparing the cloistered and the general populations. European Population Conference (EPC) 2003, Warsaw, Poland, August 28, 2003 (Marc Luy)
  • Are sex mortality differences biologically caused? Madigan revisited by a new comparison of sex-specific survival in monastic and general populations. Poster presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA), Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, May 2, 2003. (Marc Luy)
  • Nature or behavior? An answer to the question of male excess mortality by a comparison of monastic and general population. 13th Congress of the European Anthropological Association, Zagreb, Croatia, August 31, 2002. (Marc Luy)

(Abstract)

Web links

Individual evidence

Primary study 2002

  1. Marc Luy: Why women live longer . Findings from a comparison of the monastery and general population. In: Materials on Population Science . No. 106 . Federal Institute for Population Research , 2002, ISSN  0178-918X , DNB  965668789 ( ssoar.info (PDF; 1.5 MB) [accessed on November 27, 2012] plus diploma thesis 1998).
  2. Dr. Charlotte Höhn, BiB, in the foreword (PDF)
  3. p. 42, 2nd paragraph (PDF)
  4. Preliminary remark (PDF)
  5. p. 11 (PDF)
  6. p. 12 (PDF)
  7. p. 12 f. (PDF)
  8. p. 13 f. (PDF)
  9. p. 80 (PDF)
  10. P. 117 ff. (PDF)

Further individual evidence

  1. ^ Project: The Male-Female Health-Mortality Paradox (HEMOX). Austrian Academy of Sciences , accessed on February 2, 2012 (English).
  2. Nadine Oberhuber: University tariffs: Guys, it's getting more expensive . In: Die Zeit , No. 52/2010
  3. Counterstatement “Die Zeit”. Reply to the article guys, it will be more expensive by Nadine Oberhuber, published in The time on 22/12/2010. (No longer available online.) Marc Luy, archived from the original on June 22, 2013 ; Retrieved February 1, 2012 .
  4. Katrin Rüter: Opposing positions - strong piece. General Association of the German Insurance Industry , March 14, 2011, archived from the original on March 6, 2012 ; Retrieved on February 2, 2012 (counter-position to the article Jungs, Es wird auf sich von Nadine Oberhuber, published in Die Zeit on December 22, 2010): “Good journalism requires impeccable research. Some articles, even in well-known publications, seem to place less value on this.
  5. a b The Male-Female Health Mortality Paradox (ERC Project No. 262663). Austrian Academy of Sciences , accessed February 2, 2012 .
  6. DGD Young Scientist Prize. German Society for Demography , 1998, accessed on February 2, 2012 .
  7. a b c d e Marc Luy: Hella Ehlers, Heike Kahlert , Gabriele Linke, Dorit Raffel, Beate Rudlof, Heike Trappe (eds.): Gender difference - and no end? Social sciences and humanities contributions to gender research . 1st edition. tape 8 . LIT Verlag, Berlin / Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-8258-1647-6 , 10 years monastery study - knowledge gained and open questions about the causes of the different life expectancy of women and men, p. 251–273 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  8. Pekka Martikainen, Tapani Valkonen: Mortality after the death of a spouse: rates and causes of death in a large Finnish cohort . In: American Journal of Public Health . Vol. 86, No. 8 , 1996, pp. 1087-1093 , doi : 10.2105 / AJPH.86.8_Pt_1.1087 (English).
  9. Marc Luy, Nadine Zielonke: Insa Cassens, Marc Luy , Rembrandt Scholz (ed.): The population in East and West Germany. Demographic, social and economic developments since the fall of the Wall . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften , Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-8350-7022-6 , The gender-specific mortality differences in West and East Germany with special consideration of the war-related long-term effects on cohort mortality, p. 169–198 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  10. Marc Luy : Why women live longer - is a comparison of mortality between the monastery and the general population influenced by the level of education and missionary activity of the order members? In: Journal for Population Science . tape  28 , no. 1 , 2003, ISSN  0340-2398 , DNB  011081422 , LCCN  76-648849 , p. 5–35 ( marc-luy.de (PDF; 512 kB) [accessed on February 17, 2012]).
  11. ^ A b Marc Luy: Paul-Hermann Gruner , Eckhard Kuhla (Ed.): Liberation Movement for Men . On the way to gender democracy. Essays and analyzes. 1st edition. Psychosozial-Verlag , Giessen 2009, ISBN 978-3-8379-2003-1 , Why Monks Live Longer - Men and Mortality: Findings from Ten Years of Monastery Study, p. 259–276 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  12. ^ Marc Luy : Causes of Male Excess Mortality: Insights from Cloistered Populations . In: Population and Development Review . Vol. 29, No.  4 , 2003, p. 647-676 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1728-4457.2003.00647.x (English).
  13. Marc Luy, Christian Wegner: Live slowly - die old. Springer Medicine , November 22, 2011, archived from the original on December 14, 2011 ; Retrieved February 9, 2012 .
  14. ^ Charles D. Spielberger, Eric C. Reheiser: The job stress survey: measuring gender differences in occupational stress . In: Journal of Social Behavior and Personality . Vol. 9, No. 2 , 1994, p. 199-218 .
  15. Frankenhaeuser et al: Stress on and off the job as related to sex and occupational status in white-collar workers . In: Journal of Organizational Behavior . Vol. 10, No. 4 , 1989, pp. 321-346 .
  16. ^ Already eight ERC "Starting Grants" to Austria. derStandard.at , August 20, 2010, accessed on February 2, 2012 : “Marc Luy from the Institute for Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) is using a monastery study to investigate the health status and life expectancy of nuns and monks in his ERC project. It has already been shown that the majority of male excess mortality in the general population cannot be attributed to biological causes. The reasons must therefore lie in the area of ​​so-called behavioral and environmental factors. "
  17. Angela Wiedemann, Anja Marcher, Christian Wegner-Siegmundt, Paola Di Giulio, Marc Luy : The health survey of the monastery study . Data and methods to report shaft 1 (=  research report . No. 37 ). Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences , Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-7001-7662-6 ( oeaw.ac.at [PDF; 1,3 MB ; accessed on January 14, 2006]).
  18. ^ Monastery study. News: New publication. In: German-Austrian monastery study. June 16, 2015, accessed January 13, 2016 .
  19. Eckart von Hirschhausen : The liver grows with its tasks. Funny stuff from medicine . 38th edition. Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek 2008, ISBN 978-3-499-62355-4 , Klöster - It's about survival, p.  19-22 .
  20. Ralf Bönt : The dishonored sex. A necessary manifesto for the man . 1st edition. Pantheon, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-570-55185-1 , p.  18-20 .
  21. a b publications. Retrieved February 2, 2012 . Presentations. Retrieved February 2, 2012 .
  22. 23rd REVES meeting - Are sex differences in health expectancy a social issue? Retrieved on February 9, 2012 : "Réseau Espérance de vie en santé (REVES)"

Coordinates: 48 ° 12 '31.4 "  N , 16 ° 22' 38.6"  E