Parents of boys age at a faster rate than those who have girls, claims study
By Naomi White|
I?n news that may not surprise parents of boys... they age you faster.
A new study by researchers at Columbia University, New York and Charles University, Prague, found parents with at least one son showed a faster rate of cognitive decline compared to those with daughters.
And the more sons in the family, apparently, the worse the damage.
Published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, researchers assessed 13,222 parents aged 50 and above, asking participants to complete a series of tasks such as memory recall, mathematics and counting backwards.
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Of those assessed, more than 80 per cent had at least one son, and 61.6 per cent of respondents were women. ?
Tests were conducted every two years, over an 18-year period กช and the results weren't great news for those with sons, especially multiple sons.?
Similar results were seen in both male and female participants, and as researchers adjusted results for any socioeconomic factors, they found that the child's gender played a role in the decline.?
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"Parents of at least one son had a faster rate of cognitive decline in comparison to parents without any son. Our results also suggest that cognitive decline was faster among parents of multiple sons, compared to parents with only daughters," researchers concluded.
"Thus, the results support the theory that having sons might have a long-term negative effect on parental cognition."
?Researcher Katrin Wolfova said the results suggest the effects were social, rather than biological.
"Daughters provide more social and emotional support than sons and often become informal caregivers," she wrote in the Journal paper.
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