Life expectancy declining in some U.S. counties

Though the life expectancy of a major chunk of Americans is increasing, but this is not the case in certain geographical areas in U.S., where it is either declining or stagnant.

The study published in the online journal PLoS is the first to look at mortality trends in the U.S. counties and that too over such a long period of time.

The researchers analyzed life expectancy in all 3,141 counties in the United States. They collected the mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau between 1959 and 2001. The National Center for Health Statistics stopped providing any data after 2001.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Washington found that throughout the 1960s and '70s, there was a steady increase in life expectancy among both men and women.

However, in the early 1980s, it started to decline in some of the "worst-off" counties in U.S. The researchers also observed that the disparity is not spreading to many parts of the country; rather, the life expectancy of only a significant segment of the population is declining or at best stagnating.

“It’s very troubling that there are parts of the wealthiest country in the world, with the highest health spending in the world, where health is getting worse,” said Majid Ezzati, an associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and the lead author of the study .

“It is a phenomenon, he added, “unheard of in any other developed country,” he added.

The researchers also compared the 2.5 percent of counties with the lowest life expectancies and the 2.5 percent with the highest. The disparity between those two groups rose to 11 years for men and 7.5 years for women in 1999, from 9 years and 6.7 years respectively in 1983.

Counties in Appalachia, the Southeast, Texas, the Southern Midwest and along the Mississippi River have experienced a decline in life expectancy. Life expectancy increases were mainly concentrated in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast.

This is for the first time since 1918 flu pandemic that the life expectancies are falling in certain parts of the United States, said Dr. Chris Murray, co-author of the study and director of the UW's new Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in the Department of Global Health. "It's remarkable in the history of the U.S."

Researchers have noted that the death rates among women have jumped up in many poor counties in the past four decades. The cause for this is supposed to be lung cancer and emphysema as an increased number of American women have started smoking.

"This is a story about smoking, blood pressure and obesity," said Ezzati.