The United States has the lowest life expectancy of any English-speaking country, according to a new study. However, this varies considerably from state to state, with some states having much lower life expectancies than others.
“It is well known that life expectancy in the United States is very low compared to other high-income countries,” said Jessica Ho, associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State and lead author of the new paper. Newsweek by email.”[However,] “Even compared to this subset of countries with common characteristics, the United States has a very low life expectancy, which is quite alarming.”
In their study, published in the peer-reviewed journal BMJ open Earlier this month, Ho and colleagues compared life expectancy data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) and the World Health Organization (WHO) Mortality Database between 1990 and 2018 for the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.
Not only does the United States lag behind in life expectancy, it also exhibits significant geographic variation, indicating stark inequalities across regions.
“If you look within the United States, you see long-standing disparities between regions, with parts of the West and Northeast performing very well while the South and Appalachia generally lag behind,” Ho said.
One possible reason for this phenomenon could be the divergence between urban and rural life expectancy observed in the United States since the 1990s.
“Over the past three decades, large central cities and their suburbs have seen strong increases in life expectancy, while medium and small cities and especially non-metropolitan cities have much lower life expectancy levels and have seen little to no gains,” Ho said.
Factors that may contribute to these disparities include differences in health behaviors, such as smoking, physical inactivity, poor diet, illicit drug use and alcohol abuse, Ho said.
“Patterns of selective migration where healthier, better-off people tend to move to cities and coastal states, leaving behind less healthy, less well-off people; and differences in distance to hospitals and access to care,” she said.
Ho added: “The South and Midwest, which are home to much of our rural population, tend to have more lax gun laws and also have higher rates of gun-related deaths.”
With this in mind, taking 2018 data, the following five states had the lowest life expectancies:
- West Virginia — 74.5
- Mississippi—74.6
- Alabama — 75.1
- Kentucky—75.3
- Tennessee—75.6
At the other end of the spectrum, these five states recorded the highest average life expectancy for that same year:
- Hawaii—81
- California — 80.8
- Minnesota — 80.5
- New York — 80.5
- Connecticut—80.4
To address these inequalities and, more generally, declining life expectancy in the United States, the United States must address these preventable deaths, particularly among its young citizens.
“These include policies that would improve access to drug and overdose treatment, reduce traffic deaths and invest in public transportation, reduce gun deaths and reduce cardiovascular disease,” Ho said.
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References
Wilkie, RZ and Ho, JY (2024). Life expectancy and geographic variation in mortality: a comparative observational study of six high-income English-speaking countries. BMJ open, 14(9), e079365. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-079365
