We aren’t doing so well. . .

October 7, 2013 • 12:24 pm

Take a look at this graph, which plots the life expectancy of American females (red dot) relative to inhabitants of 21 other First World nations, plotted over 26 years.

Yes, life expectancy is rising everywhere, but in the U.S. it’s not rising as quickly.  Just another sign of the dysfunctionality behind the self-proclaimed greatness of America.

I have no idea of the reason for this, but perhaps national health care would have kept us in the middle.

Picture 2

h/t: A tweet from Marcel Salathe, via Matthew Cobb (who wrongly predicted this year’s Nobel Prize in biology)

52 thoughts on “We aren’t doing so well. . .”

    2. Bet you it’s Japan, bet you it’s (at least partly) to do with their diet, and bet you that the main reason the US is low is the much higher fraction of people who are very overweight.

      1. Yeah I think it’s Japan too. These aren’t huge differences though. I think it’s about a 6 year difference. The trend is worrying though.

      2. You can’t blame overweight, Australians are just as fat if not fatter than Americans.

      3. If it is Japan, it won’t be for long. They – including the women more and more – smoke like chimneys, drink like fish, spend too many hours at work, and have taken a real liking to American-style junk food. On the other hand, most of them still get more exercise than your average American, walking to the train.

      4. When I visited the US some years ago I was struck by the number of Really Fat People. Sure there were plenty of slim, fit people too, but there were more morbidly obese people than in the UK and Europe, the latter especially who seem quite fit overall, perhaps related to the greater amount of walking and cycling and lesser use of cars.

        The portion sizes at meals in the US seems far higher than is necessary too.

        1. Agree an all counts, and I live here. But the really scary thing is the percentage of children you see that are overweight to morbidly obese.

          Many parents here feed their kids almost nothing but factory food and fast food. Fast food french fries are one of the most common “vegetables” fed to kids. Soda as opposed to milk or water. Public school lunches, which many parents rely on because it saves time or money for them, are criminally bad in just about every way, especially nutritionally.

          If you gave the average american child a nice fresh salad, or a nice fresh piece of meat or fish that wasn’t battered, fried and covered in an equal weight of ketchup, they would not willing eat it.

    4. That’s exactly what I wondered too, which goes to show you how powerful well-done graphics are at communicating data. You see that graph, and two things stand out: the lagging-behind red dots, and the consistent outlier at the high end.

  2. Be interesting to compare that with a similar graph of males. Is it just women whose life expectancy is lagging, or is it everybody’s? If the former, it’d be really interesting to know what we’re doing to improve men’s health that isn’t applying to women’s health. If the latter, singling out this chart would tend to suggest gender discrimination where the reality is we’re all fucked equally.

    It’d also be interesting to see it further broken down by age of death (more young women dying? fewer septuagenarians making it to 80?) as well as other demographic breakdowns.

    b&

      1. Thanks. Shows men with a lower life expectancy than women…but, past that, I don’t have the bandwidth right now to make more sense of it….

        b&

    3. Historically, and continuing just a little less, today, medical science is based on research of men, with the results assumed to apply to women equally, and even then, not really applied that way in practice.

      Example: Heart attack research. While far fewer women have been and are research subjects, leaving doctors to assume women would have had the same outcomes, in reality, women are diagnosed far less frequently, even on a provisional basis, so that far fewer heart attacks are caught early in women.

      Pardon the lack of documentation to back this up. It is something I recall as a classic teaching point, given in medical school.

  3. I googled to find out more information because I have thoughts about the trend and ended up at this NCBI’s web site where they had a lot of graph-y goodness and especially this table (because I am not very graphically minded to my great chagrin, and love the tables).

    My advice from the table: live in countries with a lot of desert that causes people to live around the edges (that’s for all the Canucks and Aussies ;))

    1. Thanks for the reference Diana. You can even download the whole 194-page report free if you want the details.
      Here’s the TOC:
      Summary
      1 Difference Between Life Expectancy in the United States and Other High-Income Countries
      2 Causes of Death, Health Indicators, and Divergence in Life Expectancy
      3 The Role of Obesity
      4 The Role of Physical Activity
      5 The Role of Smoking
      6 The Role of Social Networks and Social Integration
      7 The Role of Health Care
      8 The Role of Hormone Therapy
      9 The Role of Inequality
      10 Conclusions
      References.
      Note the risk factors they see as significant – pretty much what you’d expect, at least as to 3 to 7 and 9.

      1. The health care part was what we expected and I had heard heart attack and cancer survival was better if in the US – I actually heard this from David Frum when Bill Maher asked him on Real Time where he’d rather be if he were sick….as Frum tried to answer, Maher kept saying, “come on man, you’re from Canada” and then Frum said if it were cancer he’d rather be in the US. However, Bill countered with, but what if you are also poor…crickets.

        The health care system in the United States differs from those in other high-income countries in a number of ways that conceivably could lead to differences in life expectancy. Certainly, the lack of universal access to health care in the United States has increased mortality and reduced life expectancy. However, this is a smaller factor above age 65 than at younger ages because of Medicare entitlements. For the main causes of death at older ages—cancer and cardiovascular disease—available indicators do not suggest that the U.S. health care system is failing to prevent deaths that would elsewhere be averted. In fact, cancer detection and survival appear to be better in the United States than in most other high- income countries. Survival rates following a heart attack also are favorable in the United States.

        1. Nearly every social ill I can think of shows stark racial disparities… with Black getting the real short end of it, and White-Hispanic being intermediate between Black & White. The patterns of morbidity and mortality have been surprisingly consistent as long as I’ve been in public health (>25 years), with my mentors reporting the same patterns going back into the 60s.

    2. What does the report say is the main cause? I just looked up one of the factors they studied and they ruled it out as a cause. I haven’t got time to read the whole thing!

      1. I’m lazy and just looked at the beginning but it mostly said that smoking killed off a lot of people as there is a big lag (I think 30 years) before the effects on mortality are seen and that the US had more smokers back in the day. Then it said that obesity could be a cause but it that was a but there wasn’t enough of a research base to make a conclusion. It mentioned that the US health care system is very different from the other countries and that it isn’t good at preventative care but then says, meh that could also be because of obesity and lack of exercise.

  4. Just out of interest, since the vast majority of women born between 1980 and 2006 must still be alive, how does one realistically assess the life expectancy of those populations?

    1. It’s confusing. “Life expectancy at birth … 1980 to 2006” doesn’t mean life expectancy of those born in that period, it means the average** age of death of people dying in that period.

      The “… at birth” is because you could calculate the remaining “life expectancy” of a 50-yr-old or a 70-yr-old, which is obviously much less.

      (**See this)

      1. Many thanks for the explanation, Coel. I was beginning to wonder if that might be the case. The only problem then is that there might be so many other factors involved in the average death age in 1980 — vaccination rates among newborns in ~1910 is just one that springs to mind — that I’m not sure how much can reasonably be inferred from the graph.

        (I say this as someone who’d love to draw the obvious conclusion from it: I’m a Brit who’s lived in the US for ~15 years and finds the healthcare system here incomprehensibly bureaucracy-riddled and barbaric. There are, of course, plenty of other measures that prove this is indeed the case, but . . . One of those measures, irrelevant to Repugnicans but pretty goddam pertinent to me, is that my beloved daughter likely wouldn’t be alive in a country without an NHS.)

        1. Take a look at the full document in PDF. It goes through some of this and you can probably skim it for the explanations.

    1. That’s why I always make my predictions about the past — it’s so much easier that way.

      For example, I predict that, headlines to the contrary, Truman will defeat Dewey. Also, don’t plan your Hawaiian vacation for December 1941.

      Cheers,

      b&

  6. The religiously motivated misogyny that prevents best sexual information, birth control and abortion can’t help either…

  7. Note that even at the beginning of the chart, 1980, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world was only in the middle of the group. I wonder if there ever was a time when it was near the top? End of the 19th Century maybe? It’s been a long slow decline for the US.

  9. Here’s a clue… if one looks at states, ranked by years lost to premature death (2005 stats):

    bottom 12: Minnesota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Utah, New Jersey, New York, California, Washington, Wisconsin, Colorado.

    top 12: Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Missouri, Georgia, New Mexico.

    Aggravating factors in the US: income / education disparities along racial lines, low quality (i.e. junk) food pushed in lower income neighborhoods, socio-economic disparities in tobacco and alcohol consumption, lack of mass transport leading to premature deaths from tailpipe emissions and car crashes, crap rates of pre-natal care (stark differences again along ethnic lines), and generally poor health-seeking behavior — not surprising if you’d rather keep your house. And rather than seeing the problems get addressed head-on, the latest years have seen increased defunding in the public sector (in no small part due to increased gerrymandering in the so-called R-safe states), so we can expect more of the same, unfortunately.

      1. 🙂 The bottom 12 (best) states: 11/12 went for Obama (with Utah as the conspicuous nutball, naturally). The top 12 (worst): 11/12 went for Romney (with New Mexico being the conspicuous nutball, naturally).

        Now it makes even less sense to be a Republican here, as they changed the rules in the primaries to guard against nasty interlopers like me. Instead of being able to cast my vote against the worst toxic idiots, I am actually forced to interact with a roomful of cretins and try to argue them into voting the way I would like them to – and then one vote is cast for the entire roomful of morons. It does expose me to how these people think, though… and it ain’t pretty.

        1. That sounds…interesting [/scare-quotes]…

          Our rules are constantly changing, but the primaries currently only allow registered members of each party to vote in that party’s primary.

          And in the regular election I just love to stand at the polls chatting with my neighbors who are there cancelling my (Dem.) vote…(Standing in a church, no less.)

  10. It is no surprise. In this country, we view healthcare as a commodity, something you can buy, or if unable, learn to live without. You could say we view healthcare as a luxury, like a yacht or a beach house, if you don’t have the money, you ain’t lucky, and you live without it. This would be totally true if it were not for some of the government programs, like Medicare, that rich people (translate = Republicans) love to hate. If everybody had yachts, they would no longer be special. A sickening state of affairs even on a good day.

    1. I agree John. What I have difficulty understanding is why so many people fall for right-wing propaganda that is clearly against their interest. Is the median intelligence level really that low, or are people simply more interested in watching sit-coms and sports than in actually learning anything?

    2. I agree John. What I have difficulty understanding is why so many people fall for right-wing propaganda that is clearly against their interest. Is the median intelligence level really that low, or are people simply more interested in watching sit-coms and sports on TV than in actually learning anything?

    1. Universal healthcare is a wonderful thing — a greater invention than even the Iphone.

      Too damn’ right, Sophie! Thanks for pointing this out.

      Every now and then humankind comes up with a great invention, most of them not recognized by the stupid because, well, the stupid are stupid. One of the great human inventions, perhaps 2000 years ago, was the sewer. Not glamorous, but a wonderful aid to public health. Round here where I live, in northern New Jersey in the 21st century, there are people vociferously protesting the installation of sewers . . .

      1. Agree, civil engineering has saved more lives than medicine. Clean water and sewerage win over doctors.

        1. I wouldn’t go that far, but engineering certainly had a head start since people understood how to make aqueducts, hypocaust heating systems and sewers before they understood the germ theory of disease and clean(er) water helped eliminate disease before they knew what it was.

Comments are closed.