Don’t tell Bryan Johnson, the tech CEO famously obsessed with not dying, but the key to living longer for men just might be getting your nuts surgically removed.
That’s the surprising finding in a new study published in the journal Nature, in which an international group of scientists studying reproduction and longevity performed an analysis on more than 100 mammals across the world, including humans.
In course of their research, the scientists found that when both females and males have their reproduction curtailed — via contraception or castration, respectively — they tend to live longer than their unaltered peers.
These findings, while eye-opening, match what we see in the everyday world. American women who reach menopause after the age of 50 have an increased chance of reaching their 90th birthday and tend to outlive men on average by five years. Castrated men throughout history have been known to also enjoy longer lifespans, which was backed up by a 2012 study that found eunuchs in the employ of the Korean royal family between the 16th and 19the centuries outlived uncut men by a staggering 14 to 19 years.
Pregnancy exacts a physical and emotional cost on female bodies, so it makes perfect sense that blocking conception would boost female lifespans.
“In females, lifespan increases after several different forms of sterilization, suggesting that benefits arise from reducing the substantial energetic and physiological costs of pregnancy, lactation and caring for offspring, rather than from a single hormonal mechanism,” said lead author Mike Garratt, biomedical science professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand — in a statement about the research.
Males who have been sterilized before the onset of puberty, on the other hand, seem to live longer because the presence of sex hormones impacts biological aging. Case in point, the researchers found, vasectomies don’t impact male lifespans to the same extent as castration.
“In males, only castration extends lifespan — not vasectomy — which indicates that the effect comes from removing sex hormones,” Garratt said. “These hormones may interact with pathways that regulate the biology of ageing, particularly during early-life development, since early-life castration has the strongest effects on lifespan. Health in later life is also increased by castration in laboratory rodents.”
For the sweeping study, the team looked at and analyzed 117 different mammals in zoos and aquariums across the world, and also analyzed several previous studies on sterilization.
From their analysis, they found that life expectancy jumped up by 10 to 20 percent after the procedures, though results depend on when sterilization happened during the lifetime of the organism. Males who get castrated before maturing live longer on average, while the timing of female sterilization doesn’t seem to impact lifespan results — though removing ovaries does tend to make women frailer and less healthy.
“Reported increases in survival in castrated men resemble the effects in other species, whereas survival of women is slightly decreased after permanent surgical sterilization,” the paper reads. “Thus the hormonal drive to reproduce constrains adult survival across vertebrates, regardless of the environment in which an animal resides.”
It just goes to show that everything has a trade off, including reproduction and living longer.
But we’re pretty sure that none of these life maxxing gurus on the Internet, like Bryan Johnson, will be willing to get gelded just to live several more years.
More on longevity: Scientists Discover Easy Hack to Live Way Longer
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