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US life expectancy drops nearly a year in 2021

After a historic drop in 2020, life expectancy in United States suffered another significant blow in 2021.

According to provisional data published Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), life expectancy at birth dropped by nearly a year between 2020 and 2021 — a total of more than two and a half years of drop in the index since the beginning of the pandemic.

Life expectancy at birth was 76.1 years, the lowest in the country since 1996, and the biggest two-year decline recorded in a century.

THE Covid-19 was the driving factor, with deaths from the virus contributing to half the decline from 2020 to 2021, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics report.

The death rate from Covid-19 was higher in 2021 than it was in 2020, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that life expectancy dropped again, Bob Anderson, the CDC’s chief mortality statistician, told the BBC. CNN .

Additionally, drug overdose deaths hit a record high in 2021, killing an estimated 109,000 people. Deaths from unintentional injuries — about half of which were due to drug overdoses — were the second leading cause of the decline in life expectancy in the US.

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, pointed out that the data is not surprising but frustrating.

“It is distressing to see an ongoing negative impact of drug overdose on American life expectancy. These deaths often occur in young adults and therefore represent a tragically high number of years of life lost and a devastating impact on individuals, families and communities,” she said.

“We have the science and tools available to help us reverse this trend and reduce the number of overdose deaths in this country, but these tools are not being used effectively.”

Even if expected, the decline is still extraordinary. In 2021, mortality rates from influenza and pneumonia declined, and had it not been for these “offsetting effects,” the decline in life expectancy in the US would have been even greater, according to the report.

“Mortality in general, particularly since the 1950s, has changed very slowly,” Anderson said. Changes of more than a few tenths from one year to the next were considered substantial.

A “surprising” decline

The recent decline among American Indians and Alaska Natives is particularly “surprising,” Anderson said.

Life expectancy for this group has dropped by nearly two years between 2020 and 2021 and by 6.6 years since 2019 — more than double compared to the rate for the total US population.

At 65.2 years, the life expectancy of American Indians in 2021 was equal to the general life expectancy of the US in 1944.

“When I saw this in the report, my jaw just dropped,” Anderson confessed.

“It was quite difficult to imagine a two-year decline of 2.7 years in the overall rate. But then seeing a 6.6-year reduction in life expectancy for the Native American population just showed the substantial impact the pandemic has had on that population.”

Deaths from Covid-19 were directly the main contributor to the decline in life expectancy among American Indians in 2021, but deaths from drug overdoses and other unintentional injuries, as well as from chronic liver disease, which is often caused by alcohol abuse, contributed almost equally to the mortality of this group.

When it comes to the pandemic, Anderson adds, “I’m not just talking about Covid-19 necessarily, but also the other factors that seem to have increased during the pandemic.”

Experts say the pandemic has exacerbated existing disparities between American Indians and others.

The Doctor. Matthew Clark, medical director of the Indian Health Service, considers the findings of the new CDC report worrying, but American Indians and Alaska Natives are known to “suffer disproportionately in terms of health from a wide variety of conditions. ”

There are “unique aspects of health to address” in these communities, he stressed, and this data should be seen as a “call to action, an opportunity to redouble our efforts” to address a wide range of factors that affect the health of these populations and whether engage with tribal communities to find solutions.

“Even in the midst of a troubling report like this, I think there is still hope,” Clark said. “There is an opportunity to move the needle in another direction.”

To do that, the goal must be to explore the root causes of these disparities between American Indians and the rest of the population, says Ruben Cantu, associate program director at the Prevention Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on health equity.

“A lot of that conversation will be around the pandemic,” Cantu said. “But we need to think about what led to the conditions that allowed certain communities to be more vulnerable in the first place,” such as crowded housing, poor access to health care, and low-income jobs that don’t allow paid sick leave.

A separate study, published as a preprint in June, found that the decline in life expectancy in the US over the course of the pandemic was “highly racialized” and substantially greater compared to a set of other countries.

In fact, this study showed that life expectancy increased slightly between 2020 and 2021 for the set of 21 peer nations.

demographic differences

The new CDC data highlights differences in life expectancy trends by race and ethnicity, as well as by gender.

In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, life expectancy declined less among whites. In the second year of the pandemic, however, this group saw the second-largest decline in life expectancy — and deaths from Covid-19 contributed to the decline among whites more than any other racial or ethnic group.

Now, the most vaccinated group, the portion of the white population that is fully immunized with the primary vaccination schedule, lags behind the black, Hispanic and Asian population, CDC data show.

Life expectancy in 2021 was highest among Asian women (85.6 years) and Asian men (81.2 years), CDC data show. Hispanic women were the only other group with a life expectancy greater than 80 years.

In the total US population, life expectancy has dropped more among men than among women in 2021, widening a gap that has been growing over the past decade.

The disparity in life expectancy between men (73.2 years) and women (79.1 years) is now nearly six years.

The life expectancy of American Indians in 2021 was 61.5 years, lower than any other group. Black men had the second lowest rate, at 66.7 years.

A recent project by the Prevention Institute focused on the mental health and well-being of men and boys. Men and boys of color — especially black and Native American men — have been found to “start with higher rates of trauma and mental health challenges,” Cantu said, which can make them more vulnerable to other conditions.

“Over the past five or six years, we’ve heard a lot more about ‘desperation’ diseases — like substance use, alcoholism and suicide — and many of them are connected,” he said. “This helps point out how vulnerable certain communities can be under many other conditions.”

Source: CNN Brasil

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