image: Age-standardized death rates (per 100,000 person-years) from drug-related causes and cardiovascular disease. Grey shaded lines are trends for individual US states and Washington, DC. Longevity leaders is the average of countries that had the highest life expectancy at birth in year 2010 (Japan, Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, Spain, Iceland, Italy, Israel, Sweden, France) view more
Credit: Image courtesy of Neil K. Mehta, Mikko Myrskylä, and Leah R. Abrams
Although the stalled increase in life expectancy in the United States beginning in 2010 has been attributed to drug overdoses and deaths, analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization finds that a stall in declining cardiovascular deaths is a more likely explanation and that the stagnant trend is in contrast to trends in other high-income nations, according to a study.
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Article #19-20391: "US life expectancy stalls due to cardiovascular disease, not drug deaths," by Neil Mehta, Leah Abrams, and Mikko Myrskylä.
MEDIA CONTACT: Neil Mehta, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI; e-mail: nkmehta@umich.edu; Mikko Myrskylä, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, GERMANY; e-mail: myrskyla@mpidr.de
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences