Old men have big ears, is the consensus of several medical studies. The most celebrated work focused exclusively on men, according with British male doctordom's smug tradition of showing interest mainly in themselves.

But in Japan and in Germany, wide-ranging investigations have made plain a long-untold half of the story: that old women also have big ears.

The British action played out in the British Medical Journal, where body parts are always of interest. In 1993, Dr James A Heathcote, a general practitioner in Bromley, Kent, set out to answer the question,<a href=" "as you get older do your ears get bigger?" Heathcote and three colleagues examined the ears of 206 men of various ages. The biggest oddity, ears aside, comes at the end. The paper mutters: "Why ears should get bigger when the rest of the body stops growing is not answered by this research."

In Japan, primary care physicians <a href=" Yasuhiro Asai, Manabu Yoshimura, Naoki Nago and Takashi Yamada measured the ears and height of 400 adult patients – of both sexes – who visited their clinics. The team's 1996 report, called Correlation Of Ear Length With Age In Japan, also appeared in the BMJ.

The doctors claim they made two discoveries: that ear length does correlate closely with age and the rather unfathomable conclusion that "ear length corrected for height shows [even] greater correlation with age".

A decade later, <a href=" Carsten Niemitz, Maike Nibbrig and Vanessa Zacher at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, examined data from a thesis by a scientist named Montacer-Kuhssary, published at the university in 1959.

Montacer-Kuhssary's data was of a rare kind: photographs of 1,448 ears of newborn children, older children, and adults up to and including 92-year-olds.

For each ear, the team made 15 different measurements. This confirmed, they say, that ears never really stop growing throughout a person's lifetime. But the big surprise came from comparing women and men: "In all parameters where post-adult growth was observed, female ears showed a lesser increase than those of men." Old men have bigger ears than old women.

Montacer-Kuhssary, by the way, noted that people's noses, too, usually grow throughout their lifetimes. But, he concluded, ears usually outpace noses.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize