Female Longevity After 40: 10 Simple Ways to Stay Strong and Healthy | Dr Vonda Wright | #146

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:00)
Women are winning the longevity race. The data show that women already live four to six years longer than their male counterparts. Female longevity is not about simply living longer, but must be about learning to live stronger and with more power. Women respond strongly to interventions such as pairing menopause triggers one of the biggest health shifts in the female lifespan. What about the critical decade between 35 and 45, where we still have enough hormones to be able to positively affect and prevent some of the time bombs of aging? We need to take active steps to design an unbreakable future, where we can live longer, better, and age with power. Longevity for women is not a timeline problem, it is a design problem.
Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, your orthopedic sports surgeon and authority on whole women's health and longevity. And today we're going to be talking about why female longevity is a design problem and how women can solve it. You know, I have never believed that aging was an inevitable decline from the vitality of youth down a slippery slope to frailty. In fact, I believe that when we pivot our mindset and step in front of some of the time bombs of aging, that we can build shields for a healthy, vital, active, joyful life. And so when it's framed that way, it takes us out of the mindset that we are the victims of the simple passage of time. No, in fact, I believe that building an unbreakable future is a matter of design. When I think about female longevity, it's important for us to realize that women aren't just smaller men. Women do not age in the same way as men. And yet, almost every major longevity study, biomarker norm, intervention, algorithm, was built on male physiology, not taking into account the profound and sometimes cataclysmic effect of losing our estrogen in the early 40s. Female longevity is not just a trend, a pop culture phenomenon. It is a science, a science that has been historically neglected and overlooked. And that's why there are misunderstandings and simply a lack of knowledge about the female experience as it pertains to longevity. So today, I'm going to just present 10 principles of female longevity from my point of view, grounded in research and designed around the biological endocrine and lifestyle realities of women living in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond. But here are five research back points that I think are critical to cover. Number one, women are winning the longevity race. I know, it seems odd to say out loud, but the data show that women already live four to six years longer than their male counterparts. And yet often we live in suffering and disability. Women can spend up to 20 to 30 years of their life with at least one chronic health condition that slows them down, leaves them in pain. Why is that? Well, one of the reasons is that men and women age differently. Starting at around 30, men and women are both at a plateau in their aging process, aging at about 1% a year. Men continue in this slow, steady decline until midlife. Women, on the other hand, start out at 1% per year, and then because of the precipitous drop in estrogen have profound aging changes in every organ of our body. Paring menopause or that time when our estrogen production becomes chaotic triggers one of the biggest health shifts in the female lifespan. Again, estrogen receptors exist on every body part, from the brain to the bone to the muscle to the heart to the gut, the immune system, and it has a profound effect on our metabolism. The transition or like I call it, the menolescence affects all of these systems at once. And while we may feel it manifesting on the outside as night sweats, hot flashes, not feeling like ourselves, what we can't always perceive is the profound aging process or aging stimulus that losing our estrogen is. The third data point that's critical for us to understand as we approach talking about female longevity is that muscle mass predicts longevity in women more strongly than simply the nearly outdated BMI or absolute weight. Low muscle mass and with it, low muscle strength, the phenomenon of sarcopenia profoundly increases mortality risk in women. But what about our hearts? What about our fitness? There's a concept called VO2 max. It is a measure of our oxygen diffusion from our blood through our lungs, and is the ultimate measure of fitness. It is therefore one of the ultimate measures of longevity. It's actually the strongest predictor of a healthy lifespan. The good news is that it's trainable at every age. Finally, biologic aging accelerates in women during the menopause transition. We've already talked about the role of estrogen, but epigenetic clocks show a measurable increase in the pace of aging during menopause. So our aging speeds up. These data points reveal a core truth. That female longevity is not about simply living longer, but must be about learning to live stronger and with more power.