Men and women get admitted to hospital at different ages and for different causes. However, it is not yet known how men and women differ in their mean age at first hospital admission in Denmark after the age of 60. Furthermore, the ages and causes of admission that account for the sex difference in mean age at hospital admission have not previously been quantified.

This study utilises linked individual-level data of the Central Population Register with the National Patient Register covering the entire Danish population. We then identified all inpatient admissions. We estimated the mean age at first hospital admission after the age of 60 for each year between 1995 and 2014, for men and women separately. We then decompose (1) the sex-specific change in mean age at first hospital admission between 1995 and 2014 by age and the main causes of admission, and (2) the sex difference in mean age at hospitalisation in 1995 and in 2014.

The increase in the mean age at hospital admission was larger for women than for men: from 69.4 to 72.6 and 68.8 to 71.4 years respectively. Cardiovascular diseases contributed most to the change among men, while neoplasms contributed most among women. The sex difference in mean age at first hospital admission increased over the observation period from 0.6 years in 1995 to 1.2 years in 2014. The increasing sex difference can be attributed to a decreasing risk of hospital admissions due to neoplasms among women. Cardiovascular diseases continued to be the most important cause explaining the sex differences in mean age at hospital admission.

In contrast to shrinking sex differences in life expectancy, we found that the sex difference in mean age at hospital admission have increased. This may indicate increasing sex differences in the postponement of disease towards older ages.