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- Americans can now expect to live 78.6 years, on average
- Women can still expect to live longer than men: 81.1 years vs. 76.1 years
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US life expectancy drops for second year
US life expectancy drops for second year in a row
Story highlights
(CNN)Life expectancy in the United States has dropped again following last year's decline, which marked the first downturn in more than two decades.
On average, Americans can now expect to live 78.6 years, a statistically significant drop of 0.1 year, according to a report on 2016 data published
Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. Women can now
expect to live a full five years longer than men: 81.1 years vs. 76.1
years.
The last time the agency recorded a multiyear drop was in 1962 and 1963.
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"I
still don't think you can call it a trend, because you really need more
than two data points to call something a trend," said Bob Anderson,
chief of the mortality statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "But it's certainly concerning to see this two years in a row."
Anderson said he is particularly concerned about drug overdose deaths, most of which are opioid-related.
"We
have data for almost half of 2017 at this point. It's still quite
provisional, but it suggests that we're in for another increase" in
drug-related deaths, he said. "If we're not careful, we could end up
with declining life expectancy for three years in a row, which we
haven't seen since the Spanish flu, 100 years ago."
The 10 leading causes of
death remain unchanged and now account for 74.1% of all deaths in the
United States, according to the report. Age-adjusted death rates
decreased for seven of the top 10 leading causes of death: heart
disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes,
influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease. The rates increased for
unintentional injuries, Alzheimer's disease and suicide.
Unintentional injuries include accidental drug overdoses, which were the official cause of 63,600 deaths last year.
"It just keeps going up and up and appears to be accelerating," Anderson said.
"In
the past, those increases have been more than completely offset by
declines in cardiovascular mortality," such as heart disease and stroke,
he said. "What's happened in recent years, since about 2010 or so, is a
substantial slowdown in the rate of decline for cardiovascular
mortality. It seems to be leveling off to some extent, and as a result,
the drug overdose deaths are more prominent in the overall picture of
mortality."
A country's infant
mortality rate (the number of births compared with the number of deaths
of children under age 1) "is generally regarded as a good indicator of
the overall health of a population," according to the report. In the
United States, this rate "changed from 589.5 infant deaths per 100,000
live births in 2015 to 587.0 in 2016, but this change was not
statistically significant."
The biggest takeaway from
the report is that heart disease and cancer are still far and away the
top killers of both men and women in the United States. The good news is
that there are three things you can do to drastically reduce your risk
of developing both: eat right, exercise and don't smoke.
It sounds like simple advice, but as anyone who has ever tried knows, it is easier said than done.
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