Eunuch Lifespan

[Arab Nights (imported)]

With all the thousands of guys castrated for medical reasons, I am wondering if there is a modern statistically valid study of the effects of castration on lifespan. Or maybe there are factors such as medical issues that lead to castration happen late enough in life or to men with a genetic pre-disposition and therefore not representative of the general population that ii becomes difficult to accurately interpret theresults. Amyway, I'd be open to a modern study. Anybody know of any?

[Valery_V (imported)]

This question was already repeatedly considered at a forum.

For example, in posts #3, #4 "Life of a castrated man":

http://forums.eunuch.org/showthread.php ... trated-man

[Arab Nights (imported)]

The reference in post 3 to the study of 80 eunuchs from the Chosen dynasty in Korea is fair enough in comparing to men of similar class. I certainly cannot question somebody referencing Korean records from 1400-1900. I do know statistics are not as straight forward as what my simple brain can handle. There is the standard opposing view stating as much from the U of Ill professor of public health.

That is why I asked specifically about a study in the recent past that would be based on current data and not surviving records from centuries ago. The Kansas study pointed out by Jesus could get closer to the heart of my question. Once a person knows about it, they can easily search for it, but the title referring to a mentally retarded population is probably going to perk up the statistical purist.

I might very gently point out that it is not immediately obvious how to search out past discussions on a subject here. The best I could come up with is under FAQ put lifespan in search and I got nothing.

[Valery_V (imported)]

Jesus also pointed to an article by researchers from the University of California:

http://forums.eunuch.org/showthread.php?30

413-Castration-delays-epigenetic-aging

[WheelyFixed]

The Kansas study has the possible questions of small sample size, and subjects that may not be representative of the larger population... The study in the thread Valery just pointed at is animal based, but interesting. There are also supposed to be a lot of other animal studies or at least data that show pretty much all critters studied from lab rodents to live-stock live longer if castrated (and not slaughtered in the case of livestock, obviously)

However nearly all of these (I forget the age of castration in the Kansas study) have what may be the important factor that the surgery happened before or near the age of puberty, so prevented or interrupted the testicle driven changes that go with it... The castrtati, Chinese & Korean eunuchs, etc. all got cut at that time, and so do most animals that get fixed... There is little hormone difference between boys and girls before puberty, so you don't get any of the testosterone effects that are now being claimed as the reason males drop dead early...

IMHO anything that looks at guys castrated because of prostate cancer or other medical issues has the problem of what is the influence of those issues....

What I have NOT seen, and don't know if anything has been done to look at those of us that have been castrated well after puberty, to see if those male changes reverse or not.... There may be something involving M-F trans folks which would be interesting though one can argue about whether those results would be skewed by the presumably larger / different hormone regimens involved in the binary transition...

WheelyFixed

[Arab Nights (imported)]

There we go, Wheelyfixed! Instead of looking at a small and possibly biased sample looking at applying it to a much larger population, look at a small population just to see what you can learn. I have done that in my beloved science of geology and actually learned a really neat thing or two that normally got lost in all the numbers. That is why it can be worth it to really think and discuss thru statistical studies. You might end up with a new idea.

[JesusA (imported)]

I doubt (or at least hope) that there is never a more complete study of the impact of castration on human lifespan than the Kansas study. Such as study would require a random set of males of various ages to be castrated and then followed through to their death from whatever cause and comparing them to closely matched males who were not castrated. The Kansas study came very close to that standard.

Between 1894 and 1961, about 1800 institutionalized males in Kansas were castrated. “Mental deficiency” was the major reason for castration, although the legislation specified sterilization for “habitual criminals, idiots, epileptics, imbeciles, and insane”. From the records of the entire set of castrated males who had already died from any cause, Hamilton and Mestler (1969) selected 297 White males (so that race was not a confounding factor) who did not have any condition that was known to reduce life expectancy, such as Down Syndrome. These 297 were carefully matched with 735 White males in the same institutions who had been institutionalized at about the same age for the same conditions but not castrated. (Reasons for the differences in castration status were not disclosed.) Those studied had been castrated over a period of several years at ages from 8 to 59. The average age of those castrated in 1898 was 12 and of those castrated in 1923 was 30. Twelve percent of those castrated had been castrated by age 14. An additional 51% had been castrated before age 20.

The median lifespan for the 735 uncastrated males in the control group was 64.7 years.

Median life span for those who had been castrated was

76.3 (castrated at ages 8 through 14 –– 12% of the subject population)

72.9 (castrated at ages 15 through 19 –– 51% of the subject population)

69.6 (castrated at ages 20 through 29)

68.9 (castrated at ages 30 through 39)

No median life span was published for those few who were 40 or older.

Nico Nagelkerke, a well-respected biostatistician and epidemiologist wrote that, re-analyzing the data the Hamilton and Mestler used, concluded that "there was a loss of 0.28 years of potential life for each year of delay in orchiectomy from 8 to 39 years of age." (Nagelkerke 2012)

The reasons for the longer life expectancy are yet to be fully explained.

In 2020, Victoria Sugrue of the University of Otago in New Zealand and a large group of colleagues from both Otago and UCLA published an article showing that testosterone reduced life expectancy in sheep. It was the impact of testosterone that increased cell aging and reduction of telomere length. Estrogen produced less aging and a lack of either resulted in the slowest cell aging process. (Sugrue VJ, et al. 2021)

Published in just the past week (June 3, 2024) is an article by Moon Song Mi exploring the impact of testosterone on infectious diseases. Moon writes that testosterone suppresses the anti-infectious response leading to greater susceptibility to bacteria and parasites than women or eunuchs. Among her detailed findings, for example, was that the mortality rate of castrated men with tuberculosis was significantly lower than that of intact men. For most of the illnesses that she mentions, however, the differences were stated only between males and females, but some rat models of immunity compared castrated vs. uncastrated male rats with castration conferring immunity to infectious disease.

Much more needs to be done on hormonal factors that effect life span.

___________

Hamilton, James B. & Mestler, Gordon E. (1969). Mortality and Survival: Comparison of Eunuchs with Intact Men and Women in a Mentally Retarded Population. Journal of Gerontology, vol. 24, pp. 395–411.

Moon Song Mi (2024). Sex/Gender Differences in Infectious Diseases. IN: Sex/Gender-Specific Medicine in Clinical Areas. Springer Verlag, pp. 311-324.

Nagelkerke, Nico J.D. (2012). Courtesans and Consumption: How Sexually Transmitted Infections Drive Tuberculosis Epidemics. Delft, Netherlands: Uitgeverij Eburon, pp. 99-101.

Sugrue VJ, et al. (2021). Castration delays epigenetic aging and feminises DNA methylation at androgen-regulated loci. eLife. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64932

[WheelyFixed]

Thank you very much for the summaries of the studies Jesus. I had either missed or forgotten that the Kansas study had folks castrated at multiple ages post-puberty. That it does at least sort of answers the question about whether the 'life extension' aspects applied to those of us getting cut later in life... I agree with you in hoping the Kansas type study where the participants didn't volunteer never gets repeated.

One program that I am involved in, and which might give data similar to the Kansas study w/o the moral implications is the "All of Us Research Program" https://allofus.nih.gov This is a program to get as big a dataset as possible of ALL the people in the US (not sure if it includes any other countries) especially groups that are underrepresented in traditional medical research. They then use this data for all sorts of research based on it...

If you sign up they will want blood and saliva samples, and access to your electronic health records, and things like fitbit data if you use one. You will also get asked (but not required) to do various surveys and so forth... I think it is a decent program and would encourage anyone on EA to sign up for it...

My thought is that the more of us voluntary eunuchs sign up, the more possibility there is of seeing Kansas type data on lifespan and possibly other interesting stuff could be figured out including comparing to 'matching' non-fixed individuals... It might even be possible to do more complete matching to expand the Kansas data to include all of the castrated subjects...

(Given your academic chops, you might even be able to do some of the researching yourself)

WheelyFixed

[Arab Nights (imported)]

I could be wrong, but I imagine the question of lifespan comes up from time to time. If correct then I would imagine at some future time some person will be curious and have a hard time finding this thread. There seem to be threads labeled 'sticky' that do not seem to slide down the list over time. I would nominate this to be a 'sticky' so Valery and Jesus' comments don't get lost.

[WheelyFixed]

I could be wrong, but I imagine the question of lifespan comes up from time to time. If correct then I would imagine at some future time some person will be curious and have a hard time finding this thread. There seem to be threads labeled 'sticky' that do not seem to slide down the list over time. I would nominate this to be a 'sticky' so Valery and Jesus' comments don't get lost.

The question has come up a few times in my memory, but not as often as you might expect... However I agree this might make a good sticky...

But what I think would be better is to go through some of the existing stickies and do a bit of condensing / rearranging to make a FAQ w/ what we know about the topic in general...

It might even be possible (not sure if the software allows it?) to make that FAQ or some version of it visible to visitors w/o an account.... I know it used to be possible to explore the forums 'read only' w/o an account, as I did for several months before signing up, but for what they see as good reasons Kristoff and the other mods have decided to make having an account mandatory to get any access... I am not arguing, but it seems like this makes it harder for those new to the idea to find good quality information... Having at least a FAQ visible to all might be a reasonable compromise.

WheelyFixed