Americans woke up to some worrying news yesterday: in the country has dropped. A child born in the US in 2015 could expect to live an average of 78.8 years 鈥� about a month shorter than a child born in 2014. The last year the country experienced a dip was , a time when the number of cases of AIDS was soaring.
This is clearly not good news. But it shouldn鈥檛 come as a shock. Changes in life expectancy follow earlier changes in health and well-being, and the poor state of health in the US has been well documented.
Earlier this year, for example, we learned that, between 2013 and 2014, life expectancy , driven largely by worsening mortality among .
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Health disadvantage
A major report in 2013 by the found that people in the US die younger and experience more injury and illness than people in other rich nations, a 鈥渉ealth disadvantage鈥� that is seen from birth to age 75, among men and women, rich and poor, and across all races and ethnicities. As director of that 2013 study, I shared with readers of 快猫短视频 this assessment of the evidence:
鈥淥ur health depends on much more than just medical care. Behaviours such as diet, physical activity and even how fast we drive all have profound effects. So do the environments that expose us to health risks or discourage healthy living, as well as social determinants of health, such as education, income and poverty.
鈥淭he US fares poorly in almost all of these. In addition to many millions of people lacking health insurance, financial barriers to care and a lack of primary care providers compared with other rich countries, people in the US consume more calories, are more sedentary, abuse more drugs and shoot one another more often. The US also lags behind on many measures of education, has higher child poverty and income inequality, and lower social mobility than most other advanced democracies.鈥�
Lifestyle illnesses
The news this week confirms all this. Not only did overall life expectancy in 2015 decline, but age-adjusted death rates increased for eight of the 10 leading causes of death. These include several chronic 鈥渓ifestyle鈥� illnesses such as heart disease, lower respiratory diseases and diabetes, as well as intentional (suicide) and unintentional injuries.
The causes also span from birth to old age: infant mortality, already very high in the US, remained unchanged in 2015, while death rates from Alzheimer鈥檚 disease increased by 15.7 per cent.
Demographers and other social scientists will now dig more deeply into the data to try to understand what is going on and why. In addition to looking for patterns by age, sex, race and geography, many will want to know if there was something unique about 2015 that might explain this drop.
The long-term trends are clear: US life expectancy has essentially stagnated since 2012, losing pace for decades with steady increases in other wealthy nations around the world. Whatever we learn about 2015, it would be unwise to lose sight of these longer-term trends.
The underlying conditions that shape health in the US are not good and , and policy in the months and years ahead will determine if 2015 is an anomaly or the beginning of a period of decline.
