US Population Has Lowest Life Expectancy Among Peers: ‘Alarming’

The United States has the lowest life expectancy of all the English-speaking nations, a new study has found.

Australians, meanwhile, tended to live four or five years longer than their American counterparts, for women and men, respectively.

“It’s well-known that American life expectancy performs very poorly compared to other high-income countries, but my prior research showed that among high-income countries, Anglophone countries tend to look more similar to one another,” Jessica Ho, associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State and senior author on the paper, told Newsweek.

“What is surprising about [our] results is twofold. First, even compared to this subset of countries with shared characteristics, the U.S. has very low life expectancy, which is quite alarming,” she said. “Second, Australia has emerged as a leader in life expectancy. Not only does it do well compared to other Anglophone countries (and many high-income countries), but it also has achieved fairly low levels of within-country geographic inequality in life expectancy.”

The study, published in the journal BMJ Open, compared life expectancy data from the Human Mortality Database and World Health Organization Mortality database between 1990 and 2019 for the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. They also investigated geographical life expectancy within each country to identify inequalities by region.

Australians consistently showed the longest life expectancy during the study period, while the Irish showed the largest gains in life expectancy, with men’s life spans increasing by roughly eight years during the study period and women’s increasing by more than 6.5 years.

As well as showing the shortest life expectancy—with women living to 81.5 on average and men living to 76.5 as of 2019—the U.S. also demonstrated some of the largest geographical inequality in life expectancy compared with other countries. For example, there was a roughly 10 year age difference in life expectancy between individuals in California and those in the American Southeast.

“Life expectancy is much lower in the U.S. than in other English speaking countries primarily because Americans die at higher rates at the young and middle ages compared to their peers living in other countries,” Ho said. “They are dying from largely preventable causes of death that younger people in these other countries are not dying from, including drug- and alcohol-related deaths, homicides, other gun-related deaths, car accidents, and cardiovascular disease.”

She continued: “The U.S. is currently experiencing an unprecedented drug overdose epidemic, and unless it is able to address that epidemic, the country will continue to experience a high burden of deaths from drug overdose…Similarly, if the country fails to address factors contributing to gun deaths and car accidents, U.S. life expectancy will continue to lag far behind its peers.”

Ho added that Australia should act as a model for how Americans can achieve a higher life expectancy and less geographical inequality.

“In order to improve American life expectancy, the U.S. needs to address the conditions that put our young- and middle-aged adults at high risk of death,” she said. “These include policies that would improve access to treatment for drug addiction and overdose, reduce road traffic fatalities and invest in public transportation, decrease gun deaths, and reduce cardiovascular disease.”

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References

Wilkie, R. Z., & Ho, J. Y. (2024). Life expectancy and geographic variation in mortality: an observational comparison study of six high-income Anglophone countries. BMJ Open, 14(9), e079365. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-079365