Parents of boys see their brains age faster than those with girls, study finds
PARENTS of boys age faster than those with girls, a study has found.
Their brain power was found to drop away more quickly as they grew older.
And the more sons in the family, the worse the damage, the researchers said.
The effect was put down to girls being more caring than boys, which helps parents to stay healthy.
The findings are from 18 years of intelligence tests on 13,222 parents aged 50 or over in the US. They had to solve maths problems and remember a list of words read to them.
Parents of boys were not any more or less clever at the start of the study, it found.
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But as their kids grew older, they scored lower in tests than parents of girls at the same age.
Researcher Katrin Wolfova, of Columbia University in New York, said: “Parents of at least one son had a faster rate of cognitive decline compared to parents without any sons.
“Results suggest effects are social rather than biological, as we observed similar trends in mothers as well as fathers.”
Writing in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, she added: “Daughters provide more social and emotional support than sons and often become informal caregivers.
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