Life
expectancy in the United States has declined for the first time in
more than two decades, according to a new report, a development
linked to a range of worsening health problems in the country.
US death
rate increased 1.2 percent last year, the first time it has increased
since 1993 and that led to a 0.1 percent drop in life expectancy,
according to a report released Thursday by the National Center for
Health Statistics.
American
males could expect to live 76.3 years at birth last year, down from
76.5 in 2014. Females could expect to live to 81.2 years, down from
81.3 the previous year, the report said.
Rising
fatalities from heart disease and stroke, cancer, diabetes, drug
overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life
expectancy.
More than
2.7 million people died last year, about 45 percent of them from
heart disease or cancer.
“I
think we should be very concerned,” said Anne Case, a Princeton
University economist who urged a thorough research on the increase in
deaths from heart disease, the biggest killer in the US.
Last year, a
study by Case and another economist at Princeton brought attention to
the unexpected rise in mortality rates among white middle-aged
Americans, a trend that was blamed on overdoses, alcoholism and
suicide, three conditions that are sometimes called diseases of
despair.
However, the
new report raises the possibility that major diseases may be eroding
life expectancy for an even wider group of Americans.
The new
findings show increases in “virtually every cause of death. It’s
all ages,” said David Weir, director of the health and
retirement study at the Institute for Social Research at the
University of Michigan.
“There’s
this just across-the-board [phenomenon] of not doing very well in the
United States,” Weir noted. Over the past five years,
improvements in death rates were among the smallest of the past four
decades, he said.
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