Life Expectancy
CDC: U.S. life expectancy declines, death rates up for heart disease, diabetes, unintentional injury
kkrisberg | December 9, 2016For the first time in more than two decades, U.S. life expectancy has dropped.
This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2015, U.S. life expectancy at birth was 78.8 years — that’s a decrease of 0.1 year from 78.9 years in 2014. Among males, life expectancy went from 76.5 years to 76.3 years; among females, it went from 81.3 years to 81.2 years. According to news reports on the findings, no one single factor caused the drop, but it’s still a cause for concern. Over at The New York Times, Katie Rogers reports:
Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor of health policy and…
kkrisberg | April 20, 2016Just a few weeks ago, legislators in New York reached a deal to raise the minimum wage to $15. And while that’s certainly a big boost for incomes, it could also turn out to be a literal lifesaver.
Published this month in the American Journal of Public Health, a new study found that if $15 had been New York City’s minimum wage from 2008 to 2012, 2,800 to 5,500 premature deaths could have been averted, with the bulk of such avoided deaths occurring in low-income communities. To conduct the study, researchers used U.S. Census data to calculate how the proportion of low-income residents in each…
kkrisberg | October 6, 2015Americans with lower incomes and educational attainment often live shorter, sicker lives than their wealthier, more educated counterparts. Contributors to these disparities can include access to care, hazardous living conditions, nutrition in early childhood, and personal behaviors. But what about workplace conditions? Do certain groups of people get sorted into jobs that exacerbate inequalities in life expectancy?
That’s the question a study published in this month’s issue of Health Affairs confronted. The researchers noted that while previous research shows that a “variety of working…
kkrisberg | September 24, 2015In the U.S., the gap in life expectancy by income is getting wider. To be even clearer: Life expectancy for people with higher incomes has gone up over time, while life expectancy for people earning lower incomes has actually declined.
In “The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy by Income: Implications for Federal Programs and Policy Responses,” which the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released last week, authors analyzed life expectancy patterns among Americans born in 1930 and compared them with projections among a group of Americans born in 1960. They found that top-…
razib | September 19, 2009This is a weird little fact which I've known for a while, but I thought readers might get a kick out of it. What is the longest-lived vertebrate individual which we have records to the extent that we can confirm with a high degree of certitude? You can guess the age and the rough species, but click below the fold for the answer. As hints I will state that the age was in excess of 150 years, and that the individual was not a tortoise.
It was a koi named Hanako who made it to the age of 226 years. Hanako was born in 1751, and died in 1977. (I notice this was posted on Boing Boing, so likely…
razib | April 30, 2009
I'm in the mood for a "feel good" story with the past week's fixation in swine flu. Half A Glass Of Wine A Day May Boost Life Expectancy By Five Years:
The Dutch authors base their findings on a total of 1,373 randomly selected men whose cardiovascular health and life expectancy at age 50 were repeatedly monitored between 1960 and 2000.
Here are the findings:
And men who drank only wine, and less than half a glass of it a day, lived around 2.5 years longer than those who drank beer and spirits, and almost five years longer than those who drank no alcohol at all.
Drinking wine was strongly…