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TUESDAY, April 29 (HealthDayNews) -- There's this odd thing about American men: They're a lot sicker than women, and die a lot sooner.
At every age, American males have poorer health and a higher death rate than their female counterparts, says David R. Williams, a senior research scientist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
Williams lays it out in the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health: If you take the 15 leading causes of death in the United States, men come in first in all but one, Alzheimer's disease. Their death rates are at least twice as high as women for suicide, homicide, cirrhosis of the liver, and accidents.
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Those numbers hint that there are men who are not following the rules of healthy, lawful behavior, Williams acknowledges. More important, he says, is that the American picture of the macho man leads to destructive behavior.
"A good example is how men respond to stress," he says. "Women are more likely than men to seek social support, particularly from other women. Men are more likely to believe that any expression of distress shows their susceptibility, so they are more likely to turn to substances."
So men are more likely to smoke cigarettes (26 percent, compared to 22 percent of women) and twice as likely to have five or more drinks a day, Williams says.
In addition, men are more likely to work dangerous jobs, he says; 90 percent of on-the-job deaths kill men.
Farming is one field in which men tend to dominate and which abounds in dangers. Another report, delivered quite coincidentally at a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meeting in Atlanta this week, illustrates one of those dangers. Men are more than twice as likely to die during thunderstorms, according to Thomas J. Songer, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
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