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(Hypertension. 2005;45:489.)
© 2005 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial Commentaries

Does Aging Cause Women to be More Sympathetic Than Men?

Jens Tank

From the Franz Volhard Clinical Research Center, Medical Faculty of the Charité and HELIOS Klinikum, Berlin, Germany

Correspondence to Jens Tank, M.D. Franz-Volhard Clinical Research Center, Haus 129 Wiltbergstr. 50 13125 Berlin, Germany. E-mail tank@fvk.charite-buch.de

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

According to life expectancy tables, women outlive men. One possible explanation might be that women have less sympathetic drive than men and therefore are more energy efficient. What are the main gender differences in this regard? The major contributors protecting the cardiovascular system in women are sex hormones. In fact, estrogen enhances vascular dilatatory mechanisms and baroreflex regulation in humans and in animals.¹ Moreover, reduced sympathetic nervous system activity, augmented sympathetic inhibition, and higher cardiac vagal tone in women, compared with men, have all been described.^1–5 Finally, the responsiveness to stressor stimuli may be diminished in women compared with men as well.¹ In summary, despite the overall increase in sympathetic activity with aging, for any given age women seem to have less sympathetic drive than men.

The increase in cardiovascular risk with aging is more pronounced in women⁶ and women seem to be more susceptible to risk factors than men,⁷ even at younger age. Data from microneurography studies in a Japanese population support this hypothesis.³ Furthermore, Narkiewicz et al⁸ were able to show convincingly that the increases in sympathetic activity for every decade of life was higher in Caucasian women, compared with men based on resting MSNA measurements in a large number of subjects from two different populations (USA and Poland). Interestingly, the results were independent of body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio. This finding is important because, body fat distribution was shown to be related to MSNA in an earlier study.⁹ Moreover, the investigators also showed that menopause did . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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