Department of Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1300 University Blvd., CH464, Birmingham, AL, 35294, USA.
College of Animal Sciences, Zhejiang University, Zijingang Campus, 866 Yuhangtang Road, 310058, Hangzhou, PR China.
Mol Cell Endocrinol. 2021 Jul 1;531:111310. doi: 10.1016/j.mce.2021.111310. Epub 2021 May 12.
In every population across the world, women live significantly longer than men; however, the underlying physiological processes that drive these sex differences in age-specific mortality are largely unknown. Recently, the role of adipose tissue in aging and longevity has been a focus of biomedical research in both humans and rodent models. Specifically, brown adipose tissue, a thermoregulatory tissue originally thought to not exist past infancy in humans, has been shown to potentially play a role in health throughout the lifespan. Females have larger adult brown adipose depots that are not just larger in size but also more efficient in non-shivering thermogenesis. This improved functioning of the brown adipose tissue may potentially lead to improved female health, and we hypothesize that this advantage may be of even bigger significance in the older population. Here, we briefly review what is known about sex differences in aging and how sex differences in brown adipose tissue may be contributing to the female lifespan advantage. These questions have usually been addressed in large experimental studies in rodents as a translational model of human aging. Overall, we propose that a better understanding of the thermogenesis-metabolism nexus is necessary in biomedical research, and sex differences in these factors may contribute to the female longevity bias seen in human populations.
在世界上的每个人群中，女性的寿命都明显长于男性；然而，导致这些特定年龄段死亡率性别差异的潜在生理过程在很大程度上尚不清楚。最近，脂肪组织在衰老和长寿中的作用一直是人类和啮齿动物模型中生物医学研究的焦点。具体来说，棕色脂肪组织是一种体温调节组织，最初被认为在人类婴儿期后不存在，但已被证明可能在整个生命周期中发挥作用。女性有更大的成年棕色脂肪组织储存量，不仅体积更大，而且在非颤抖产热方面效率更高。棕色脂肪组织的这种改善功能可能会导致女性健康状况的改善，我们假设这种优势在老年人群中可能更为重要。在这里，我们简要回顾了衰老过程中的性别差异以及棕色脂肪组织中的性别差异如何可能导致女性寿命优势。这些问题通常在啮齿动物的大型实验研究中得到解决，作为人类衰老的转化模型。总的来说，我们提出，在生物医学研究中，有必要更好地理解产热-代谢的关系，而这些因素中的性别差异可能导致人类群体中观察到的女性长寿偏见。
