DEATH RATES RISING AMONG MIDDLE-AGED AND YOUNGER AMERICANS

Wed 03 March 2021:

Young and middle-aged adults (25-64 years old) in the U.S. have been dying at higher rates since 2010, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. High and Rising Mortality Rates Among Working-Age Adults says that rising death rates are striking working-age Americans, whose risk of dying from certain conditions — such as drug overdoses or hypertensive heart disease — has been climbing since the 1990s.

“We’re losing more and more Americans in the prime of their lives, in their most productive years and in their parenting years,” said Kathleen Mullan Harris, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, who authored the report.

The report said progress in life expectancy in the US began to stall in 2010, despite continuing to increase in other high-income countries.

“Alarmingly, US life expectancy fell between 2014 and 2015 and continued to decline through 2017, the longest sustained decline in life expectancy in a century,” it added.

The US’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said last month life expectancy in the country dropped to 77.8 years, lowest since 2006, in the first half of 2020 with COVID-19 playing a major role.

In 2020, life expectancy for non-Hispanic Black people declined the most from 2019 by 2.7 years to 72 years — its lowest level since 2001.

Hispanic population saw the second-largest decline with 1.9 years to a life expectancy of 79.9 years.

To address working-age mortality and advance research and data collection, the report recommends, among other actions:

Policymakers should address substance use disorders and take lessons from the opioid epidemic to implement policies to prevent future crises, such as strengthening regulatory control and monitoring of prescription drugs and improving access to substance use and mental health services.
Obesity prevention programs should start early in life and target children and teens most at risk for obesity, including racial and ethnic minorities, people living in poverty, and women.
States that have not done so already should expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Government and private organizations should fund research on more effective ways to prevent substance use disorders, reduce obesity, improve heart health, enhance behavioral health services for mental illness, and help those struggling to stop smoking or to obtain effective treatments for chronic diseases.
Government and private organizations should encourage creative research strategies that bring together different disciplines to unpack the complex influences on death rates, such as the role of social, economic, and cultural factors at the national, state, community, family, and individual levels.
To reduce and ultimately eliminate racial/ethnic and other socio-economic inequalities that continue to drive racial/ethnic disparities in U.S. working-age mortality, policymakers and decision-makers at all levels of society will need to dismantle structural racism and discriminatory policies of exclusion in areas such as education, employment and pay, housing, lending, civic participation, criminal justice, and health care.

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