Harvard study sees disparity in life span
WASHINGTON - Life expectancy may have reached an all-time high for the United States, but it is declining in many poor counties, especially among women, researchers reported yesterday.
Smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure are taking the lives of women in Appalachia, Mississippi River states and parts of Texas, according to a Harvard School of Public Health study.
"There has been increasing disparity in health in the US population for two decades," said Majid Ezzati of the school's department of population and international health, who led the study.
Last September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that life expectancy had risen to almost 78 years in 2005 - up from 75.8 years in 1995 and 69.6 years in 1955. The United States ranks about 42d in the world in life expectancy.
The CDC noted that US whites will live longer than blacks, and women longer than men. But Ezzati and his colleagues found many exceptions to this rule based on an analysis of death rates in all US counties from 1961 to 1999.
"Female mortality increased in a large number of counties, primarily because of chronic diseases related to smoking, overweight and obesity, and high blood pressure," the researchers wrote in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine. Overall US life expectancy increased mostly because of fewer deaths from heart disease and stroke. But by the 1980s, death rates started to head back up in many counties.
"The majority of these counties were in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas," Ezzati's team wrote.
