Stagnating, declining life expectancy in segments of US population

The bottomline of a report on life expectancy in the United States is role of self-destructive personal behavior — unprotected sex, smoking, fatty foods, and lack of exercise. But is it ultimately a failure of society, including the church, to identify the hurt and provide a message of hope?

Harvard Medicine+Science reports:

A new, long-term study of mortality trends in U.S. counties from 1960 to 2000 finds that an overall average life expectancy increase of 6.5 years for men and women is not reaching many parts of the country. Instead, the life expectancy of a significant segment of the population is actually declining or at best stagnating.

The majority of the counties that had the worst downward swings in life expectancy were in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas.

The study appears in the April 22, 2008, edition of the open-access journal PLoS Medicine.

[Lead author Majid] Ezzati said, “The finding that 4% of the male population and 19% of the female population experienced either decline or stagnation in mortality is a major public health concern.”

The researchers also analyzed data on deaths from different diseases and showed that the stagnation and worsening mortality was primarily a result of an increase in diabetes, cancers and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, combined with a slowdown or halt in improvements in cardiovascular mortality. An increase in HIV/AIDS and homicides also played a role for men, but not for women.

The diseases that are responsible for this troubling trend seem to be most related to smoking, high blood pressure, and obesity. “Smoking and blood pressure have a long history of being controlled through both personal and population strategies[,” said Ezzati.]

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