While life expectancy across America has continued to climb generation after generation, a new study says the life span for women is declining in 313 American counties, mostly in the nation's southern regions. That's one reason public health experts predict that children born in many parts of America can actually expect to live shorter lives than their parents, which is unprecedented.
The research, conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, is based on death certificate data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Washington researchers tracked life expectancy from 1987 to 2007 at the county level all across America.
Lives are shortest in Appalachia, the Deep South and Northern Texas.
They found that life expectancy for men increased in all but six counties, though the men in the area where the women's life expectancies were in decline fared worse than in other counties. They also found that life expectancy was going up in the northern part of America, pretty much across the board.
In an attempt to see how American life expectancy compared in a more international context, they also collaborated with researchers at Imperial College, London, and found that between 2000 and 2007, more than 80 percent of U.S. counties "fell in standing against the average of the 10 nations with the best life expectancies in the world, known as the international frontier," a release fron the institute said.
"We are finally able to answer the question of how the U.S. fares in comparison to its peers globally," said Dr. Christoher Murray, institute director and a study co-author, in a release. "Despite the fact that the U.S. spends more per capita than any other nation on health, eight out of every 10 counties are not keeping pace in terms of health outcomes. That's a staggering statistic."
Nationally, the shorter life expectancies were "particularly concentrated in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia," according to Remapping Debate's report on the study. Five Mississippi counties had the lowest life expectancies for women, fewer than 74.5 years, which was shorter than female life expectancies in Honduras, El Salvadore and Peru, the research showed.
Women live the longest in Collier, Fla, at 86 years average, which is longer than in international leaders France, Switzerland and Spain, the researchers said.
Black men and women have lower life expectancies than white men and women in all U.S. counties. And in some states, there are dramatic chasms between life expectancies from county to county — often as much as a decade within a state.
In Utah, men saw an average 3.2 year gain in their life expectancy, from 74.3 years in 1987 to 77.5 in 2007. Women gained 1.8 years, going from an average life expectancy of 79.7 to 81.5 years of age.
When Remapping Debate staffer Mike Alberti contacted health officials in some of the counties seeing decline, he found mixed reactions and a fair amount of consternation.
"That is just so surprising," Gino Solla, Ector County Health Department director in eastern Texas, told him. "I could offer you an explanation, but I'd be shooting in the dark."
The researchers suggested that increased rates of obesity and smoking are at least partly to blame, but note that they're speculating on it. The CDC data did show, however, that the states that had declines in life expectancy also saw their obesity rates more than double bewteen 1990 and 2009. They also noted that high blood pressure is less apt to be diagnosed in women than in men and its incidence is on the rise.
A Kansas City Star editorial adds that "economics and barriers to care may also play a role in decreasing life expectancies."
An article by Matt Rosenberg on About.com offers a fairly comprehensive explanation of life expectancy and recent trends worldwide, as well as an explanation of some of the gender differences.
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