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US Life Expectancy Falls Further (cnn.com)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday released data that shows life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), pushed down by the sharpest annual increase in suicide in nearly a decade and a continued rise in deaths from opioid drugs. "Influenza, pneumonia and diabetes also factored into last year's increase," The Wall Street Journal adds. From the report: Economists and public-health experts consider life expectancy to be an important measure of a nation's prosperity. The 2017 data paint a dark picture of health and well-being in the U.S., reflecting the effects of addiction and despair, particularly among young and middle-aged adults, as well as diseases plaguing an aging population and people with lower access to health care. The U.S. has lost three-tenths of a year in life expectancy since 2014, a stunning reversal for a developed nation, and lags far behind other wealthy nations. Life expectancy is 84.1 years in Japan and 83.7 years in Switzerland, first and second in the most-recent ranking by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. ranks 29th.
White men and women fared the worst, along with black men, all of whom experienced increases in death rates. Death rates rose in particular for adults ages 25 to 44, and suicide rates are highest among people in the nation's most rural areas. On the other hand, deaths declined for black and Hispanic women, and remained the same for Hispanic men. As drug and suicide mortality has risen, deaths from heart disease, the nation's leading killer, went down only slightly, failing to offset the increases in mortality from other causes and prolonging another worrisome trend.
White men and women fared the worst, along with black men, all of whom experienced increases in death rates. Death rates rose in particular for adults ages 25 to 44, and suicide rates are highest among people in the nation's most rural areas. On the other hand, deaths declined for black and Hispanic women, and remained the same for Hispanic men. As drug and suicide mortality has risen, deaths from heart disease, the nation's leading killer, went down only slightly, failing to offset the increases in mortality from other causes and prolonging another worrisome trend.
Long working hours, stress due to stupid societal expectations, bullying via social media, poor health care unless you have a cush job ... they all have consequences.
In Russia, liver cirrhosis and lung cancer are natural causes.
The enormous difference between age-adjusted death rate of Whites and Hispanics is surprising.
White males are dying at a 40% higher rate than Hispanics (age adjusted of course.)
This is about the same as the gender gap in death rate, which starts from birth. Males are much more likely to die in cots, or as toddlers in pools.
Is the racial gap across life like that, or appearing in middle age from diet-related disease?
Do the English-speaking children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants maintain that advantage if they live a mainstream American lifestyle?
i.e. nature or nurture?
The good news is the end appears to be coming, and with a quickness.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You either live long enough to go bankrupt from the out of control US healthcare system
or you die young without ever having to experience the horrors of how this country treats
its elderly.
Personally, I think I would prefer the latter over the former.
( and I'm closer in age to the latter than the former )
"White men and women fared the worst"
Woah, you cant say that!
And it is a stupid comment, given that the year-to-year changes are very small, a tiny fraction of the persistent differences by race and gender:
See page 2: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/...
Black males are more than twice as likely to die, as Hispanic females of the same age.
Which makes the overall death rate increase of 0.4% from last year, or 0.13% fall in life expectancy, look trivial.
I was sad when it was Princess Leia.
Preventative healthcare is the key to a long life. Stopping stuff early keeps it from killing you suddenly or having permanent effects. People with poor healthcare (or limited access because of cost) tend to skimp on preventative healthcare, with corresponding effects on life expectancy. Why does the country with the most expensive healthcare on earth have the worst healthcare in the G20? Because dying patients are good for business.
[US] life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years
One tenth of a year was the difference between USA and the 50 years embargoed Cuba in WHO 2015 study.
30k deaths in 2017 from fentanyl overdose, most of it coming from China. And rates are growing exponentially.
There's lots of cancer cures now, cancer is no longer the absolute death sentence it once was. Heart disease? Just ask Dick Cheney if they can fix it.... yeh they can. You blamed immigrants bringing "untreatable contagious conditions". What disease exactly? "heart disease"?? "Suicide"?
Lots of cures for lots of diseases, but healthcare has been de-funded, and large parts of Obamacare have been undermined, and you cannot afford it because you are old and have existing preconditions.
Lots of cures for lots of diseases, BUT NOT FOR YOU.
Of the two countries with the longest lifespans:
Switzerland has compulsary healthcare insurance, aka Obamacare.
Japan has 70%/30 state/compulsary private insurance.
It's not immigrants that bring the problem, the Republican party is home grown. Fox News is a *domestic* propaganda outfit. I's not immigrants that defunds Obamacare.
nothing that cant be fixed with Tech :)
[($)]
As life expectancy goes down, the possibility that social security will work goes up. The less people who can claim the benefits means more money to fewer survivors. Grim, but it's the truth.
Famous last words in the past...
Hey, watch this!
Famous last words now...
I've got an idea for an viral video! Let's try...
(Hint - the Tide Pod challenge)
American life expectancy has for years (since I've been following it) trailed most developed nations, according to the OECD (https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO_1_2_Life_expectancy_at_birth.pdf). Kind of goes along with paying more than any other country in the world for healthcare (https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm), and having poor showings in most measures of public health (https://data.oecd.org/health.htm#profile-Health%20status). Add income inequality (1% vs. 99%) and income stagnation for the Rest Of Us, with suicide and drug abuse increases and life expectancy decreases? Not in the least surprising.
Basically if you're [anyone I dislike] ....
You wish. In fact it's the gun-owning rural conservatives who are committing suicide in growing numbers. From TFA:
This also goes some way to explaining why the declining life-expectancy is a white thing.
What's sad about this is the sole reason for the lowering is the large increase in drug overdoses.
If we would just legalize drug use we could ensure people got help they needed instead of hiding the problem for fear of being arrested... and get safer drugs to boot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I plan to live for a hunnert yeaz.
Exactly correct, you should ban your government from using those statistics. The only thing allowed is member of the original American nations, natural born US citizens, immigrant citizen (from where ever), how old they are (responsibilities and protections), their gender (male or female or anything they want to make up, protection) and that is pretty much it. Hey I am olive skin in winter I am white and in summer I am golden brown (well used to be, do slack to go out in the sun that much anymore), so what colour am I, white or brown, technically that was called olive skinned and I still hold to that and the only reason to keep record, would be to keep whitey out of the sun, they burn real bad. So skin colour should not be record except for police identification purposes.
The US government needs to stop tracking anything in bullshit term of race, purely citizenship born or immigrant and if immigrant where did they immigrate from, that is it. Any record of Negro, Hispanic, White et al, should be deleted and banned (except of course olive skinned, that is special and should be kept track of, bwa hah hah).
Obama care compulsory for profit Republican Health Insurance as first proposed by Mitt Romney is shit and the pharmas, hospitals, insurance only attacked it as part of the scam to block universal health care. Don't fucking ask for universal health care, demand it and taxes need to go as high as necessary to pay for it, done and finished.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The difference in suicide rate from AC's link is 12 per 100,000. (18 vs 6)
The overall death rate is 885 vs 632, a difference of 253 per 100k.
So suicide rates, while high, only explain 5% of the white-hispanic male difference.
USA numbers are bad because of the underclass of uninsured and un cared for people.
But slash dot readers are middle class (despite their wingeing). and I think you will find that middle class Americans do just fine.
Just don't ever get poor.
Is a product of poor education and poor diet. The areas affected suffer both.
Poor genetic health is a factor, with urban communities typically having better genes, but that would be overwhelmed by diet and education.
America's he-man culture and lack of functioning health service (mental health is virtually absent, synthetic opium is handed out like candy by doctors to make up for it) are other major blunders.
And remember this is an average life expectancy, it's different for men and women. Men tend to live shorter lifespans. And it's male lifespans that are falling fastest.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The middle class is dying. And the bulk of people I've worked for were unhealthy slobs who will die stupidly young.
The air pollution around Portland, OR - home of the middle class, or at least theur books - is replete with heavy metals such as mercury. And restrictions are being lifted. It will get worse.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, yes, globally.
Regionally, there are communities where it's abnormal to not live to 100 and a fair few reach 110-120. In better shape than most people are at age 60.
We need a better understanding of what their lifestyle does to their body.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
How many decades since the 1950's have top expert tried to work heart conditions out?
Zero. It's happening now but with fever obvious advances given that the basics are known already.
With all the worlds top epidemiologist , diet tracking, decades of long term health studies?
So who is this top epidemiologist that have to be involved to make the ongoing effort valid in your eyes?
How to make your nation not sick again.
It'd be impossible but a good start would be actually following the advises on exercise and food. Exercise helps the whole body regenerate including the brain, even mental problems can be effectively treated with regular exercise. Eating more healthy is known to reduce cardiovascular problems and can potentially even help against some age-related health problems.
Study the advanced nations that are not sick all the time.
I don't understand... The study of nations with longer lifespan is already done but your characterization of them is very wrong - they are also "sick all the time".
Stop letting people wonder around with known contagious conditions. Stop letting people into a nation with really expensive and untreatable contagious conditions.
The first is a good one and one that is already done. The second, well, I don't understand how you think things work right now?
Note that there is complexity here. There are societal and economical problems in stopping less serious diseases for instance the common cold, there are indications that doing that could actually worsen the spread of more serious diseases (by making the immune system less responsive) and potentially make autoimmune diseases more common. Similar effects are (last I read about it) assumed to be behind the increase in allergies.
That should slow the random and unexpected spread of expensive medical conditions.
Which you can provide several examples of I presume?
Find out why the same medical problems keep on adding up every decade and every generation.
And this isn't done?
Free charity health care exists. Doctors are still graduating on merit with advanced skills so the medical care is still of good quality all over the USA.
Free health care, lol. Not even in "socialist" Europe is that true, in the US? Nope. The care is generally good if one can have it, excellent for most cases with a few areas where Europe or Japan is currently leading.
The academic side and treatment side is still good. Why the numbers of new random sick people wondering around?
Genetics, lifestyle choices, random chance, environmental factors.
The US still has the generations of experts who can track medical conditions and publish their findings. The real origins and spread of complex medical conditions should not be a total mystery per city/state/federally.
And it isn't for simple cases. Most life-threatening diseases aren't transmittable and have complex factors.
Create a kind of software map or GUI to zoom in on problem city and areas? List all the conditions and work out why?
Should be a nice big grant and publication in that.
If your ideas how things work would be close to reality, probably.
No matter how good your doctor is, if you cannot afford him he could be offering eternal life and you'll still croak from a preventable disease because you just can't afford it.
And with more and more people not being able to... well, what do you expect?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's also a major contributor to intentional death, so it evens out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The thing about gun-owning rural people is that they've got, well, guns.
Looking into the numbers more it seems the attempted suicide rate is about the same. Just those with guns are much, much more successful.
Do "complex factors" make the USA so very unique?
A series of advanced nations have the same levels of decades of industrialization in and around their city areas.
The same transport, factory products. The US did improve on occupational safety and health. Such a large number of industrial conditions would be easy to track.
The same levels of water treatment. The same ability to design working sewer systems. For many decades.
Food should be of the same quality to average working and middle class populations. Doctors do notice and report conditions resulting from a lack of food.
Back to the question of what a well funded US wide epidemiologist study could find.
What are the "societal and economical problems" that makes some advanced nations able to do "health" care on average for their average populations?
Re "Genetics, lifestyle choices, random chance, environmental factors."
Hows the US populations "genetics" different?
Lifestyle choices? Are other advanced nations making their populations do more sport more often?
What are the "random chance" factors unique to the USA not spread over other advanced nations globally?
Re "environmental factors? Lots of unexpected super fund sites in middle class and working class communities all over the USA nobody has ever noticed?
A US epidemiologist would have found that polluted area and published on that interesting collection of medical conditions.
Advanced nations like the USA can track and gather long term health information related to unexpected health problems in any community.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The CNN article does not mention gun deaths - it is a major contributor to unintentional death and suicide.
Highlighting the fact that 65% of all gun deaths are due to suicide would take away from their anti-gun arguments. That is why it was not included. Anti-gun zealots never want to fracture the gun death statistics.
Can't imagine there's much of a difference in food, housing, work stress, workplace accidents or homicide (which is AFAIK is only a really big killer for black men, who are mostly killed by each other). Only thing that I can think of is the effect of hispanic men being more likely to be working manual labor and thus getting more exercise. Particularly ones that emigrate into the U.S as adults have probably spend their childhood getting a good amount of exercise as it's known that childhood exercise has beneficial effects that last well into adulthood.
Come to think of it, seeing how these figures are based on the information of people who have died, a childhood and early adulthood spent elsewhere could explain a good chunk of the "death gap" between white and hispanic men. Less time to clog up your arteries and destroy your internal organs with unhealthy food, less time to get prescribed opioid painkillers unnecessarily and be addicted to them, less time to have the effects of a sedimentary lifestyle set in, less time to be subject to all kinds of carcinogenic and otherwise unhealthy compounds in the environment, etc.
Still, a race-based cause-of-death breakdown would probably be necessary to turn this from guessing to anything more concrete.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
See if the number of infant mortality was increasing that would explain it, but they have stayed stable or lower slightly. Therefore while this can explain an *offset* between USA and other OECD country, it cannot explain the trend. Furthermore even as an offset, it is incredibly low and cannot account for such a huge discrepancy : infant mortality even with those "lowered" rates are 3 per live birth in Germany and 6 per live birth in USA. That cannot account for the discrepancy in average life expectancy difference : 1.7 years that would require far more than 3 more baby per live birth to drop an average of 1.7 years over 300 million people (hint : 3 more death of baby per 1000, so about 12000 baby death per year, so per cohort at most I come with a gap of about between 1 and 2 month of contribution. That still leaves you 18 month to explain and baby death will not do that).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
And yet Canadians can expect to live ~5 years longer than USians: https://www.statista.com/stati...
It's close. (in the USA) Heart disease killed about 800,000 in 2017, but there were 880,000 abortions. It used to be close to 1.4 million/yr, so that's good progress.
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
So the solution is to kill them indirectly by not preventing their death?
At least you don't gun them down in the streets for sports, I guess.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Basically expressing concurrence (or some form of solidarity?) with this comment and some others you've made, but I don't (ever) have any mod points to give you. [I've stopped wondering why no mod points. Just one more aspect of the broken and incurable state of Slashdot in general and the moderation in particular.]
However it takes years for new causes to affect mortality statistics and therefore I think it is too soon to blame #PresidentTweety, even though I agree he is a YUGE source of unnecessary stress. I'm certain that I would be quite unhappy if I were trapped in a reality TV show, but this surreality show, even without the TV, is really starting to get to me.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
And one of the aforementioned Blue Zones is... guess what? In the U.S..
My point stands. Or sits. Or does yoga. Whatever it takes to convince people to look at the whole.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You'll find the Blue Zones are remarkably difficult to research over the whole of recorded (3,500 BC to now, excluding 2,200-1,500 BC) history. Even in modern times, although the historical records are there, the people who track records tend to rely on self-reporting. Why, exactly, would some Chinese goatherder, Japanese fisherman or Greek farmer go to the trouble of contacting Guinness Book of World Records?
And you'll also find one of the Blue Zones in the US.
Anyways, if you have a higher than normal percentage of the population living to 100 in generally better health than elsewhere, a higher than normal percentage must live beyond that. Unless you think the Greek islands are haunted by an axe-wielding maniac.
122 is improbable, as the human body is physically incapable of living past 120 unaided. That means all dates given must be +/- up to 2-3 years. Maybe more. Probably more. Records, even today, are notoriously unreliable.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Then let's find the right website. My cousin recently graduated from university and is seeking a first job, but most job postings in his combination of field (computer science) and location (Fort Wayne, Indiana) require a degree plus two years of related experience. He told me that he doubts that, say, working at a Wendy's restaurant for two years would qualify as "related" enough. What website should he be looking at? Or should he instead be asking the HR department of each company seeking experienced workers where other successful candidates have earned their two years of related experience?
The suburbs and rural living kill you now. Both are completely car dependent now. That wasn't true 30 years ago. New subdivisions are designed so that you do all your shopping in big box stores. You don't walk anywhere and you barely even talk to your neighbours. It would make most kids suicidal or drug addicts. The rural areas lost their youth to cities, their local stores to the big box stores and their sense of community. The USA might claim an unemployment of under 4% but a better number to look at is the work force participation rate for white males between 20 and 44. It's only 83%. That's abysmal. The USA is getting very sticky as far as moving. New immigrants are willing to move for work but existing people in rural areas are not. As a result many have given up on finding work so they don't count as unemployed. We need to change our urban planning so people can live in cities and be neighbours again. Otherwise more of us will be going to the funerals of our children.
A bunch of hand-wavy stuff about something-something being the "same," followed by a bunch of unknowns that obviously would be known if the hand-wavy stuff was actually known.
Yes, it is true; if we had more data, we could have more studies about that data. But most of your blathering isn't about answerable questions, but about unanswerable questions. If we were in a dictatorship, perhaps a study could be arranged, and we could just force half the neighborhood to exercise more, and quantify exactly how much of that neighborhoods differences were due to exercise, and how much was due to pollution. But we can't.
Go and try to study any of that shit, and you'll either come up with a bunch of steaming bullshit, or else you'll realize that apples-to-apples data is elusive, even in an overall data glut.
Exponentially so far. Look at the graph. It will taper off, of course, but so far it's a classic hockey stick.
So much for government involvement in curing Tay-Sachs disease or sickle-cell anemia.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Cardiovascular disease not resulting from defects present at birth is almost completely preventable through diet, exercise, and supplements. As a person ages, the occasional blood test is a good idea to make sure that everything is working properly.
A similar argument applies to cancer, but compared to heart disease our knowledge is less advanced with respect to what needs to be known. Applying what's now known, from a young age and throughout your life, should cut cancer risk by at least half.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate