Why science says having a boy toy could shave years off women's lives... yet ... trends now
Madonna has long been a fan of the cougar lifestyle - saying that younger men's zest for life makes them better partners.
'People who are older, and more set in their ways, are probably not as adventurous as someone younger,' the pop superstar told the New York Daily News in 2015.
But research suggests that having a boy toy could send women to an earlier grave.
A 2010 study found Danish women who were just a decade older than their partners were 20 percent more likely to die early, from any cause, compared to women who were partnered with people their own age.
This could be because women take on more stress in a relationship than men do, which ages them more quickly, Stacey Litam, an assistant Professor at Cleveland State University and Forbes Health Advisor who studies sexual wellbeing, told DailyMail.com.
Cher, pictured here with her boyfriend, rapper Alexander Edwards. There is a forty year age gap between the pair.
The study found that the opposite was true for men - Danish men with the same gap between their female partners actually lived 11 percent longer than other men who were married to women of a similar age.
But experts told DailyMail.com that aspiring cougars should not be put off by a single study.
68 year old Kris Jenner is currently coupled up with 43 year old actor, Corey Gamble. That makes for a 25 year age gap between the two.
The research, published by University of Stockholm sociologist and demographer, Professor Sven Drefahl, drew it's conclusions by looking at an older dataset about the lifestyles of 1.8million Danish people over age 50 in heterosexual marriages.
Often times, having a large dataset for a scientific study makes it more robust.
But when it comes to papers like this, that look back at datasets to draw conclusions, a huge number of variables can actually be a detriment, Professor Richard S Balkin, a sexual health researcher at Mississippi University, told DailyMail.com
He explained that when you include as many people as are featured in this study, you can find relationships between variables that aren't actually related.
'When you have a lot of data you could have a significant finding that's not actually meaningful,' he explained.
Therefore, he wasn't convinced by the paper that all women who get into relationships with younger women are doomed to die earlier than other people their age.
Plus, these relationships are actually relatively rare in the US, so it might not be accurate to translate the Swedish study to
