A study published in May 2010 in the journal “Demography” looked at data collected from over 2 million Danish couples. Statistics showed that women who married partners seven to nine years younger than themselves had an increased mortality rate of 20%.

The study, carried out by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, found that women who marry considerably older men also tend to have shorter lives. A big age gap either way from a woman’s point of view has a detrimental effect on her life expectancy.

A woman’s best choice of partner for a long life is someone of the same age or slightly older.

Men who marry younger women are a much better risk to a life insurance company

This is not the case for men since the research showed that the mortality risk of a man who marries a woman seven to nine years younger than himself is reduced on average by 11%, compared to marrying someone the same age.

“Health Selection” doesn’t work for women

Previously it was thought that it was beneficial for either partner to marry a younger spouse.  This idea known as “health selection” says that those selecting younger partners are generally healthier and have the potential to live longer than others, and that by matching up with someone younger this would increase the positive psychological and social effects which help in older age.

Why don’t women  benefit from their younger husbands

According to researcher Sven Drefahl, “One of the few possible explanations is that couples with younger husbands violate social norms and thus suffer from social sanctions.” It is also believed that the psychological and social benefits an older husband gets from a younger wife do not hold true the other way round – the husband is unlikely to have as many social contacts as a woman would and is less likely to match a woman in terms of the level of care he will offer his ageing wife.

The good news is that life insurance for married couples is cheaper overall

The bright side is that marriage raises life expectancy for both sexes compared with the unmarried, with women overall still outliving men by a few years. This makes them more of a positive investment for a life insurance company when it comes to taking out a life insurance policy.

photo credit: jenny downing

Iceland leads in life expectancy.

Life Insurance Premiums Likely to Differ Depending on Location

The report showed that although the global mortality rate for adults has fallen by 1% a year for the past 40 years, the difference between the mortality rate of those countries with the highest and lowest rates is increasing. Substantial increases in adult mortality have been seen in the Sub Saharan Desert and in the Soviet Republic due to the Aids epidemic and a significant decline in mortality rates in South Asia. One implication of this new information is that people living in South Asia will be able to get lower Life Insurance premiums.

Individuals with Best Chance of Low Life Insurance premiums

The countries with the lowest mortality rates for men are: Iceland, Sweden, Malta, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Australia – in fact Australia’s mortality rate decreased dramatically from 44^th place in 1970 to 6^th in 2010. The UK came in at 19^th for mortality rates, Greece at 22^nd.

The report was bad news for the U.S. however, since mortality rates have increased for both men and women – with men dropping to 45^th place (170 deaths per 1000) and women to 49^th. This puts the U.S. way behind its neighbor, Canada whose mortality puts them in 28^th place – a statistic which some people may find surprising.

According to Dr Christopher Murray, author of the study, there may be good reasons for this “Part of it is that Canada is doing a much better job in tobacco than the United States.” Another factor is that Canada has universal health care and less incidence of so-called “affluence diseases” such as high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary heart disease and obesity, rates of which are increasing more rapidly in North America than in the developing nations.

Women of Cyprus have Best Chance of Longevity

For women the best place to live is Cyprus, followed by South Korea, Japan, Italy and Greece with Spain retaining a good rating (looks as though that Mediterranean diet pays off after all).

The adult mortality rate has big implications for public health globally and is listed as a Millennium Goal, but has been somewhat neglected until now. The latest research will also be useful for life insurance companies when it comes to underwriting policies in different countries.

Sources

Reuters

Huffington Post

Recent research carried out by the Boston Medical Centre, University of Boston, shed new light on the role genetics play in the aging process. The study, entitled the “New England Centenarian Study,” is the largest study of people who have reached the age of 100, and includes data from as far back as 1995.

It was found that 77% of the 1000 participants possessed 150 genetic variants in common, so-called ‘longevity genes’. From this research it may be concluded that the presence of these genes in individuals could possibly indicate an increased potential to live to the age of 100.

Environmental Influences also Play a Significant Part in Lifespan

Simply possessing these genes does not insure you are going to live a long, fruitful life. Environmental factors play a huge role in determining ones life expectancy. Factors such as smoking, becoming overweight, and diet will all play a part in determining how long a person will live – which are the same factors life insurance companies have to take into account when assessing a person’s insurance premiums. It is also worth noting that although it seems 77% of people made it to the age of 100 with genetic factors helping them, 23% did it without.

‘Longevity’ Genes may Suppress Harmful ‘Aging’ Genes

Exactly what part these genes play in increasing lifespan is not entirely known. Previously it was thought some people lived longer because they lacked some of the harmful genes which hasten the onset of aging diseases; this new research tells us that in fact longer-lived people possess all the harmful genes, along with the 150 newly identified ones.

This would seem to indicate that ‘longevity genes’ have an ability to suppress harmful genes, somehow limiting their power to trigger aging illnesses in individuals. It was also discovered that in 90% of the centenarians studied none suffered from any typical age-related illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s or dementia, until after the age of 93.

Implications for Medicine and Life Insurance

This study has big implications for preventative medicine in the area of aging related disease. It is hoped that further research will be extended in order to focus on different nationalities including the Japanese, believed to have the longest life expectancies of people on the planet. This type of research will also be of great interest to life insurance companies – access to this type of new genetic information might give life insurers a more informed way of assessing risk; knowing that potential life insurance customers have genes which make them likely to live to 100 might reduce life insurance premiums for them since a payout on their life insurance might be a long way off.

Better rates on life insurance would be great – but being told you possess ‘longevity genes’ can’t really be topped.

A diagram showing the inner workings of an artery

The rising epidemic in obesity and diabetes in the U.S. is frustrating heart experts in their attempts to reduce heart disease. The message about living a healthy lifestyle and keeping weight down just doesn’t seem to be getting through. It is hoped, however, that looking at our health from a different perspective – in terms of our ‘vascular age’ we might be motivated to make the necessary lifestyle changes to cut our future risk of heart problems.

“There’s a saying that ‘you’re as old as your arteries,’ meaning that the state of your arteries is more important than your actual age in the evolution of heart disease and stroke,” Says Geetha Raghuveer, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine. “We found that the state of the arteries in [some] children is more typical of a 45-year-old than of someone their own age.”

How is vascular age calculated?

By taking into account such things as age, sex, cholesterol, blood pressure, whether or not you smoke, as well as any instances of stroke, heart failure or arterial disease, a health professional can tell us the ‘real’ age of our arteries. A 35-year-old might turn out to have the blood vessels of an average 80-year-old — a real shock to the system.

A look at the risk of heart disease based on vascular age

Could my vascular age affect my life insurance?

Your ‘vascular age,’ along with other indicators could well have a bearing on the cost of life insurance you can get.  The estimated age of your blood vessels, if significantly higher than your real age will indicate to a life insurer that you are more likely to die younger, from heart complications. Life insurance companies cannot ignore this kind of information when assessing your premiums.

Make lifestyle changes to lower your vascular age

By changing your habits and lifestyle you can rapidly improve the health of your arteries. By adopting a healthy lifestyle not only will your life expectancy increase, but your risk to a life insurance company will decrease. You may even end up having a vascular age which is significantly lower than your real age, which will make you an even better bet when it comes to taking our life assurance.

photo credit: perpetualplum

We’ve all heard the main and obvious reasons to quit smoking. Heart disease and cancer are two of the biggest killers of people in our time and two of the most preventable as well. World Health Organization studies indicate that if left unchecked, smoking could easily wipe out more than a billion people in this century. If the Titanic sank with all hands every 24 minutes for the next 100 years, that would be close to the number of deaths from smoking.

Three quarters of smokers today are trying to kick the habit which is up 32 percent from twenty years ago. The reasons for quitting have only gotten more prevalent as health issues have connected cigarette smoking to everything from diabetes to blindness and everything in between. It’s not just about heart disease, stroke and cancer anymore. Now, the health issues associated with smoking can even harm your children and those around you. Here are a few other quality of life issues associated with smoking that you may not know about.

Smoking and Life Insurance Premiums

Smoking not only affects your health and quality of life, but it also affects your finances.  Take the example of a 56-year-old smoker shopping for a 15-year term life insurance policy. The cheapest policy on the market for a preferred smoker’s term life policy is $3555 annually from Transamerica and Western Reserve. In fact, preferred smoker’s life insurance rates could run as high as $4865 annually.

So how much would a similar policy for a non-smoker cost? $1160. That’s right – a smoker’s policy is as much as five times the average non-smoker’s policy. Try smoking that.

Smoking and the Mind

Smoking cigarettes may actually work to cloud the mind, in middle aged subjects. Nicotine has been associated, in recent studies, with memory problems and a decrease in reasoning abilities. This risk is apparently lessened in those subjects who’ve quit smoking long ago. This is important because other studies have shown that people who develop mild cognitive problems in midlife are more prone to developing conditions of dementia in their later years.

Smoking and Your Vision

Several studies have also found a definite link between smoking and degenerative eye disease. Age-related macular degeneration, which can cause permanently-blurred vision or blindness, is one of the chief eye conditions caused by smoking cigarettes. A 2005 study presented in the journal Eye reported that active smokers are three times more likely to develop eye disease compared to those who have never smoked.
photo credit: P/UL

There’s no getting around the fact that the current economic conditions are getting on peoples’ nerves. The stress factors that many people have to deal with are rising rapidly as life insurance and other financial matters grind away at the thoughts and worries of everyone. There’s a definite link between financial pressures and personal stress and for many people that means not being able to deal properly with the everyday matters of life such as friends and family. Unfortunately, having a good life insurance plan usually doesn’t mean it’ll help you live a better life while you’re here. That’s why it’s important to keep your quality of life in the upper reaches by dealing properly with stress levels.

The simple truth is that 44% of all employees in America are living from one paycheck to the next with 60% of all employees – even the more successful ones – worried about their financial future and whether or not they’ll continue to be able to make ends meet. It’s very important that you don’t allow financial worries to begin to take a toll on your personal health. Stress has a very subtle way of grinding away at a person a little more every day until only the raw nerve ends are showing. Increased stress levels can also mean increased health costs to people who have a hard time dealing with the stress brought on by uncertain financial times.

Tips for Reducing Financial Stress in Your Life

If you find yourself grinding your teeth and hyperventilating you don’t have to be a genius to realize that you’re probably under stress. Here are a few tips to help you recover your bearings.

• Get up and walk around and let new surroundings help to clear your head.
• Don’t try and be a stress superhero; take a five-minute rest from stress to recompose yourself.
• Recognize when you’re body is being put under stress and get relief by turning your thoughts to a positive trajectory.
• Be proactive in the early stages of stress before it becomes overwhelming and harder to manage.

Job pressures, family obligations and other personal commitments will all contribute to your levels of stress so be ready to defuse potential stressors when you can. Something as simple as walking around the office can help you deal with the stress brought on by factors such as your current financial portfolio.

Life Insurance as a Financial De-Stressor

Life insurance helps quell financial stress, particularly if you’re worried about your family should something unfortunate occur. If you choose a whole life insurance plan, you can be sure that your coverage will last for the entirety of your life. If you choose a term life insurance option, you’ll at least have the comfort of a set period of time for coverage – and many term life insurance policies give you the option to renew your policy at expiration.

Whatever steps you take to take away the financial stress, a few minutes of relaxation and introspection can help turn even the most doomsday of thoughts towards optimism and hope. The world financial situation may be stressful now, but wait around a few years and things will turn around.

photo credit: gingerpig2000

The headline “suicide” probably jumped out at you like a red flag in front of a mad bull. Suicide is nothing to take lightly, and it certainly isn’t in this case here. Chantix, an anti-smoking drug created by the pharmaceutical mega-giant Pfizer, has been linked to cases of depression, psychiatric problems and even suicide. Maybe you have never heard of the drug, but you probably know someone in your life who is a smoker. If they have ever thought of quitting, pass this vital information along to them.

What is Chantix?

According to drugs.com, Chantix “is used as a smoking cessation medicine or treatment. It is used together with behavior modification and counseling support to help you stop smoking cigarettes. Chantix works in the brain to block the pleasurable effects of smoking. This helps to decrease your desire to keep smoking.” That right there might be a warning sign for some: “works in the brain.” Taking a drug like this is no lighthearted undertaking; it literally affects the way your mind thinks and feels about smoking, and obviously other things in your life as well, and as you will see below, has had disastrous side effects.

In the last reported quarter of 2007, Chantix accounted for 988 serious injuries in the US reported to the FDA, more than any other individual drug in this time period. By comparison, the FDA received a median of five reports of serious injury for 769 different drugs. Following that fatal quarter, the total of 20,745 cases reported from January to March was 38 percent higher than the average for the previous four calendar quarters, and the highest for any quarter, a report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices stated. Fatalities accounted for 23 percent of the cases.

The total number of deaths, 4,824, was an increase of nearly 3 percent from the last calendar quarter of 2007. According the a Public Health Advisory issued last year by the FDA, from May 2006 through December 2007, they received 227 reports of suicidal acts, thoughts or behaviors, 397 cases of possible psychosis and 525 reports of hostility or aggression. These included 28 cases of suicide and 41 mentions of homicidal ideation, 60 cases of paranoia and 55 cases of hallucination.

Your Life and Life Insurance Are in Your Hands

The terrifying thing about studies and drugs like Chantix is that the power of your rationale and subsequently, life, are placed in someone else’s hands. In the cases of drugs that work miracles to help with cancer and diabetes, this might be a good thing, because you are being healed. With Chantix, the drug seems to be doing harm to innocent people only seeking to kick an addiction, and despite positive results in some patients, the possibly fatal side effects cannot be ignored. These statistics should help prompt you to think about the value of your own life, whether you are seeking to quit an addiction to smoking or not. Having a life insurance policy is one of the smartest steps you can take to protect yourself and your family.

You never know what life is going to throw at you, how certain medications may affect your body, or even how poorly people are going to be driving on the roads any given morning. If you were to suddenly and unexpectedly pass away and you were without a life insurance policy, your loved ones would be left with nothing. Life insurance policies are designed to protect the family you leave behind in the case of an unexpected death. Funds from a life insurance policy can be used to help cover any funeral or memorial costs or to simply help with everyday things like mortgage payments, a child’s tuition, groceries.

Life insurance policies can normally be as flexible as you need them to be: you can decide your premium (the amount you pay per month) your beneficiaries (who the money would go to if you died) and even determining a cash value that you could potentially draw out of if there was an emergency while you are still alive. There are various types of life insurance plans to consider: Temporary insurance, whole life coverage, universal life coverage, limited pay and accidental death. This only a small smattering of what is available to you; life insurance specifically for smokers is available, and this http://www.my-life-insured.com has a number of special topics designed to help you learn more about what policy might work best for you.

photo credit: aprilzosia

photo credit: hans s

Let’s pretend for a minute that you could decide what a year of your life would be worth. That decision would be based on what you felt a year of ‘quality life’ would be worth for you to have to give up, forgetting about any life insurance policies or coverage that you may have. It will probably be a very hard figure for you to come up with and will depend on whether you’re young and single or older with a family depending on you to take care of them. Would it be one million dollars? More? Less?

Life is Worth Less Than You May Think

Well, would you believe that the value of a year of life has been calculated and standardized by life insurance companies as being worth…are you ready for this?

$50,000.

Yup. That’s it. Barely a year’s salary for most people these days. While some studies have worked to place a much higher figure on treatments that can help people with health issues live longer lives, the health and life insurance companies – as well as most government agencies – still use the $50,000 figure as the standard when calculating medical treatments or insurance coverage. Using a dollar figure to represent the value of a human life, may seem to be in very bad taste, but most institutions and agencies dealing with life and death routinely use this sort of dollar figure to calculate a variety of values.

Still, calculating the amount of your life insurance benefit on this statistic alone may not be the best barometer. Stanford scientists have challenged the $50,000, and say that a year of life is actually worth around $129,000. The Stanford School of Business calculation is based largely on the cost of kidney dialysis, which is then adjusted for quality of life (according to the study, one year of “quality life” is equivalent to two years on dialysis).

What About Life Insurance for the Military

For instance, the $500,000 that the government pays out to families of American soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan isn’t really meant to replace the value of that person’s life. The pay out is merely to help the family of the slain soldier better deal with getting on with the rest of their lives. It’ll never replace the soldier in their lives, but again…the government agency needed a dollar value and a committee somewhere decided on $500,000 as the figure.

Source

• Time Magazine. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,00.html.
  

photo credit: Kah Zanon.

It may seem like just a harmless habit that anyone can stop at any time, but smoking tobacco is one of the hardest addictions to break. In young people, the damage from tobacco smoke can also cause lung development to be reduced, which will have an impact on maximum lung functions later in life. Teenagers also are at a much higher risk of addiction because teens become addicted to substances at a much faster rate.

Life Insurance for Sons and Daughters Who Smoke

In addition to your young one being at risk for all of these negative effects, you may find another shocker – and that’s in the pocket-book. Life insurance for your teenager or college-age son or daughter may cost you as much as $350 / month more. That’s because life insurance policies are able to set higher rates for smokers. The way each company sets their premium varies, but it’s often determined by how much tobacco your son or daughter consumes.

Some companies differentiate between light and heavy tobacco usage, while others have two levels of smokers: Standard and Preferred. Your son or daughter will generally fall into the preferred tobacco level, but make no mistake: Premiums will still be significantly higher than they would be if they did not smoke at all.

How to Get Them to Quit

Quitting smoking may be difficult for your young one, but you should try to convince them that chronic bronchitis, heart disease and high risk of stroke are just some of the hazards associated with smoking tobacco. More than half a million Americans die from tobacco-related causes every single year, with the great majority of them having started smoking when they were in their early teens. Smoking can also cause you to look bad. Tobacco smoke dries the skin out and causes wrinkles and can even contribute to premature grey hair and hair loss.

Playing any type of sport is much more difficult when you smoke. Shortness of breath and dizziness will have a detrimental effect on everything you try to do physically. Every year many thousands of people die from complications arising from constantly being around someone who smokes and breathing in their smoke.