Why do women outlive men? Science zeroes in on answer

Article here. Excerpt:

'Beltran-Sanchez and his colleagues began by examining common causes of death of people going back more than 200 years. They used data from the Human Mortality Database to find information about the deaths of people born between 1800 and 1935 in 13 countries across North America and Europe. Then they combined this with data from the World Health Organization’s Mortality Database to determine death rates by cause.
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While these numbers are small, they add up over time - for people born between 1900 and 1935, men were two to three times more likely to die in their 50s and 60s than were their female counterparts, the researchers wrote. This gender imbalance, which Beltran-Sanchez refers to as “excess male mortality,” is caused primarily by cardiovascular disease and smoking-related deaths, he said.

In the first part of the 20th century, smoking was much more common among men than women, Beltran-Sanchez said.'