9 ms·

The U.S. Just Lost 26 Years' Worth of Progress on Life Expectancy

97 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

LudwigNagasena 4y ago
A clickbait title behind which there is a yet another article about COVID.
- digdugdirk 4y ago
  The title is still accurate, no? And the reason for the decrease in life expectancy is still a reflection of the state of the US public health system.
  - black_13 4y ago
  - notfed 4y ago
    The title subliminally suggests that we've lost 26 years of life expectancy. Many will perceive it this way. This very reasonably can be considered a form of clickbait.
- anoonmoose 4y ago
  The article definitely discusses COVID because it is a big driver behind this drop in life expectancy but it also talks about other causes of death that have increased in frequency that contributed to this change, and other causes of death that have actually decreased in frequency (but not enough to offset). Overall I found this to be a good article. I don't see how the title can be clickbait if it it contains an interesting data point that is expanded upon well in the article.
jmartrican 4y ago
Do they use average for these numbers? I suspect they do. I wish they would give median, mode, and standard deviation also.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  It is super rare to see information on the data’s distribution. You are lucky if they even specify if the average is mean or median.
philliphaydon 4y ago
Living longer is generally bad for the economy. Why do we care so much life expectancy. Other than a measurement a countries success?
- becquerel 4y ago
  Because human life is more valuable than the economy?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Other than us as individuals wanting to live long and see our family grow or to explore the wonders of the world. Why does one person living long have more value over someone having a good quality life?
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      I don't see how these are mutually exclusive.
    - achanda358 4y ago
      People living longer is generally a proxy for people being healthier. A healthier society is more prosperous since people can work more and produce better output.
      - philliphaydon 4y ago
        Sure but you end up with wealth hoarding as older people live into retirement and by the time they pass on their kids are entering retirement.
        marcinzm 4y ago
        Then tax them or otherwise increase the distribution of wealth. "Kill them since it's easier" is such an odd way to look at things to me.
Gareth321 4y ago
There is a surprising meta story buried in this data. While covid killed many, and (unintentional) overdoses were in second place, heart disease was in third place. On first glance this might not seem extraordinary, but it is. Heart disease isn't something that presents over a matter of months or even years. It takes decades of obesity/smoking/high blood pressure/diabetes for atherosclerosis to form, before one might suffer a heart attack. A sudden lifestyle change during covid shouldn't have resulted in any change to present day heart attack rates. But it did. There is data pointing at two possible causes here. The first is neat and politically palatable. Covid increases the risk of heart attack. (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00403-0#:~:text=Massive%20study%20shows%20a%20long,SARS%2DCoV%2D2%20infection.&text=Even%20a%20mild%20case%20of,a%20new%20study1%20shows https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00403-0#:~:text=M...). The second, much more contentious fact is that mRNA vaccines elevate the risk of heart attack. (https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1554 https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1554) In fact, Danish research currently indicates that those who have taken the mRNA vaccines are at greater risk of all-cause mortality. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4072489 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4072489). Note that this paper is currently in peer review. It is receiving more scrutiny than perhaps any other paper in history. There are literally trillions of dollars on the line. Using public, global data, the Danish researcher finds that one is more likely to die after taking the mRNA vaccines, even after accounting for the protective effects against covid. Interview here for those interested (https://unherd.com/thepost/study-into-mrna/ https://unherd.com/thepost/study-into-mrna/). I think it likely that the increase in heart attacks is a combination of both of these factors. Disclaimer: I have taken three mRNA vaccines.
- heartbreak 4y ago
  Hasn’t heart disease been the top cause of death for years?
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    Yes, heart disease and stroke have been way up there for decades. Type 2 diabetes, also diet-driven, is a close follower. Cancer may have been behind these two but it as well has many diet-driven types, but I’m not sure how much those comprise overall rates of cancer.
albertop 4y ago
The cost of lockdowns.
xnx 4y ago
With so many excess deaths due to COVID, should we expect a deficit of deaths in coming years?
- tchaffee 4y ago
  In that the people who are already dead won't die again? Since they will no longer be counted I would expect numbers to simply return to average among those left living. I doubt the survivors are extra healthy or less susceptible to the normal causes of death.
  - taolegal 4y ago
    No, as in those that were going to die in the future, will no longer die in the future. Returning to the average doesn't make sense. There's a fixed amount of deaths that have to be spread across the timeline somehow and logic would tell us that lots of early deaths (concentrated very heavily in the elderly range of the age distribution) will necessarily subtract from the future. Of course there's a ton of other variables at play that could hide this reality.
    - tchaffee 4y ago
      That's not how the math works though. The people who are dead brought the average down because they died at a younger age. The only way to compensate for that would be if those left alive live longer than average. There is no reason to expect that to happen.
      - taolegal 4y ago
        It seems to me like I'm arguing the instantaneous rate of death will be lower afterwards, since there's a swath of elderly people missing from the population, but you're arguing about the average reverting over time (and specifically that it won't revert from the impact of the pandemic). I don't think the premature death impact of covid will be that large compared to, say, obesity or diabetes. So the impact on the average won't be severe & could be easily offset if our public health leaders produced actual positive results. Instead we've got an unhealthy population and no one accepts the blame.
newaccount2021 4y ago
phamilton4 4y ago
I wonder how much of this has to do with COVID and how much has to do with fentanyl. I am shocked that no one is even talking about the excess fentanyl deaths. Also how much of this is attributed to our fading health system?
- ajross 4y ago
  Everyone is talking about fentanyl. The problem is that overdoses aren't "excess deaths", those show up in hospitals as real data. And they aren't enough to explain the kind of numbers we saw with covid. Surely fentanyl overdoses are a problem, and they get a bunch of coverage. But they absolutely aren't "the real story" behind the covid excess death numbers; that's just your priors arguing in your head.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Fentanyl overdoses and suicides are excess deaths in that they contribute to excess death numbers when they are higher than expected. They just don't account for the full number of excess deaths over the last few years - the lion's share is almost certainly from the virus.
  - mitchdoogle 4y ago
    This article about life expectancy specifically lists overdose deaths as a major contributor to decreased life expectancy
    - ajross 4y ago
      The comment I was responding to was positing that the covid "excess deaths" statistics (not the same thing as life expectancy measurements) were confounded by fentanyl overdoses. They are not.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Fentanyl and suicide tend to kill young people, while COVID tends to kill people who are very old (at one point, the average age of a COVID death was greater than the life expectancy number). It's the increasing mortality of young people that really drops life expectancy.
yboris 4y ago
Is life expectancy measured from 5 years old onwards, or from 1 second old? It's frustrating to see numbers thrown around about how much life expectancy rose over the years in the past, only to discover that the average was so low because so many kids never made it past 5 years old. Why would including those deaths be in any way informative for people alive? That average tells me almost nothing about my life expectancy! :( The article never mentions it, but the graph says "at birth" is the starting point.
- issa 4y ago
  Maybe the article was updated since you read it? It goes into their methodology: "Arias and her colleagues calculated life expectancy using a technique called a period life table. This involved the researchers imagining a group of 100,000 hypothetical infants and applying the death rates observed for the real population in 2021 for each year of those infants’ lives. The result is not the life expectancy for a cohort of actual babies born in 2021 but rather a snapshot of how life expectancy rates would apply to various age groups at a specific point in time, Arias says."
- aabaker99 4y ago
  "Life expectancy" is short hand for life expectancy at birth, but other life expectancies such as life expectancy at age 65 are also measured. For instance, https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-65.htm https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-65.htm
  - tomrod 4y ago
    The conditional distribution of time-to-death is how I interpret it after conversation with my actuary fellow friend. "Conditional on being in this well-defined population, how long until I die in expectation?"
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  Well that is a problem with all stats reporting. Infant Mortality is another one "journalists" love to beat the US health system over, never highlighting how the different stats are reported by different nations, or other factors that make the US infant Mortality rate naturally higher due to our reporting standards, and standard procedures. Life Expectancy is not really a good guide for anything, it is just a number various political groups can use to influence public policy to their agenda
giantg2 4y ago
"Addressing these gaps in life expectancy would require the U.S. to overhaul its health care system and make it work for everyone, many experts say." Are they even listening to what they, themselves, are saying? Yes, healthcare reforms can help. The economic gaps they previously mentioned are still going to be a problem. It doesn't matter if you have totally free healthcare if you lack any hope for your economic situation. That's where the substance abuse (liver disease, OD, etc), suicide, and other self destructive behaviors are still a problem. Ostensibly, the Healthcare reforms would have the least impact on the overall issue since Medicaid and Medicare are available to Native Americans already, and covid mortality is skewed to the older populations who are eligible for these programs already (although sign-up and other administrative issues may exists).
mrandish 4y ago
When I poke deeper into these type of life expectancy headline claims, I usually find life expectancy is continuing to improve for the typical North American adult who does not: * Abuse drugs or alcohol. * Become obese. * Commit suicide. While the overall statistical decline is unfortunate, the underlying causes result from things already known to shorten lifespan. If you add eating healthy, reasonable exercise and maintaining routine healthcare the numbers improve even more.
credit_guy 4y ago
This is bogus. "Life expectancy" is the number you obtain after you run a statistical model. More precisely the Lee-Carter model [1]. The Lee-Carter model is based on the idea that over more than one hundred years the average annual mortality rate (or rather its logarithm) decreases linearly for all ages and other buckets (sex or race for example). So, you fit a one factor linear model using SVD. Now, after Covid-19, we've had an outlier event. Any linear regression would be thrown out of wack after such an event. Or, to be more technical, any L2 linear regression. What is the predictive power of the Covid event for the future mortality? One can claim that people affected by long Covid will show increased mortality rates in the years and decades to come. Maybe. In any case, the Covid event holds zero predictive power to newborns. And life expectancy is by definition the life expectancy of newborns. Bottom line: this is just a statistical artifact. Life expectancy now is not lower than before Covid. If anything, Covid accelerated some advances in medicine, so life expectancy is higher than the projected increase over 2 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee%E2%80%93Carter_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee%E2%80%93Carter_model
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "the Covid event holds zero predictive power to newborns" If their parents, siblings, or grandparents died or suffered long-term health consequences then newborns could be affected in all sorts of ways, up to and including shortening their lifespan. The economic impact of COVID-19 will also affect people's mortality, as fewer opportunities, less earning potential, and economic recession will affect people's health by resulting in poorer health care, unhealthier living conditions and food, and quite possibly depression -- all of which are known to affect lifespan. So I wouldn't be so quick as to rule out any affect on newborns. It's just more complicated than merely saying that X number of newborns died directly due to COVID-19.
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    You are right, but all those things can't be predicted by running the Lee-Carter model, which looks at the realized mortality in the past. So, one might say, "There's a possibility future mortality could potentially be higher", this is not the statement made by Scientific American. The statement is "Our evidence tells us the mortality will be higher; it will be about as high as if we turned back time by 26 years". That is absolutely not the case. It's misinterpreting the results of a model that is applied mechanically to data that should not be applied to.

97 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

A clickbait title behind which there is a yet another article about COVID.

digdugdirk 4y ago
The title is still accurate, no? And the reason for the decrease in life expectancy is still a reflection of the state of the US public health system.
- black_13 4y ago
- notfed 4y ago
  The title subliminally suggests that we've lost 26 years of life expectancy. Many will perceive it this way. This very reasonably can be considered a form of clickbait.
anoonmoose 4y ago
The article definitely discusses COVID because it is a big driver behind this drop in life expectancy but it also talks about other causes of death that have increased in frequency that contributed to this change, and other causes of death that have actually decreased in frequency (but not enough to offset). Overall I found this to be a good article. I don't see how the title can be clickbait if it it contains an interesting data point that is expanded upon well in the article.

jmartrican 4y ago

Do they use average for these numbers? I suspect they do. I wish they would give median, mode, and standard deviation also.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
It is super rare to see information on the data’s distribution. You are lucky if they even specify if the average is mean or median.

philliphaydon 4y ago

Living longer is generally bad for the economy. Why do we care so much life expectancy. Other than a measurement a countries success?

becquerel 4y ago
Because human life is more valuable than the economy?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Other than us as individuals wanting to live long and see our family grow or to explore the wonders of the world. Why does one person living long have more value over someone having a good quality life?
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    I don't see how these are mutually exclusive.
  - achanda358 4y ago
    People living longer is generally a proxy for people being healthier. A healthier society is more prosperous since people can work more and produce better output.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      Sure but you end up with wealth hoarding as older people live into retirement and by the time they pass on their kids are entering retirement.
      - marcinzm 4y ago
        Then tax them or otherwise increase the distribution of wealth. "Kill them since it's easier" is such an odd way to look at things to me.

Gareth321 4y ago

There is a surprising meta story buried in this data. While covid killed many, and (unintentional) overdoses were in second place, heart disease was in third place. On first glance this might not seem extraordinary, but it is. Heart disease isn't something that presents over a matter of months or even years. It takes decades of obesity/smoking/high blood pressure/diabetes for atherosclerosis to form, before one might suffer a heart attack. A sudden lifestyle change during covid shouldn't have resulted in any change to present day heart attack rates. But it did. There is data pointing at two possible causes here. The first is neat and politically palatable. Covid increases the risk of heart attack. (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00403-0#:~:text=Massive%20study%20shows%20a%20long,SARS%2DCoV%2D2%20infection.&text=Even%20a%20mild%20case%20of,a%20new%20study1%20shows https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00403-0#:~:text=M...). The second, much more contentious fact is that mRNA vaccines elevate the risk of heart attack. (https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1554 https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1554) In fact, Danish research currently indicates that those who have taken the mRNA vaccines are at greater risk of all-cause mortality. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4072489 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4072489). Note that this paper is currently in peer review. It is receiving more scrutiny than perhaps any other paper in history. There are literally trillions of dollars on the line. Using public, global data, the Danish researcher finds that one is more likely to die after taking the mRNA vaccines, even after accounting for the protective effects against covid. Interview here for those interested (https://unherd.com/thepost/study-into-mrna/ https://unherd.com/thepost/study-into-mrna/). I think it likely that the increase in heart attacks is a combination of both of these factors. Disclaimer: I have taken three mRNA vaccines.

heartbreak 4y ago
Hasn’t heart disease been the top cause of death for years?
- steve_adams_86 4y ago
  Yes, heart disease and stroke have been way up there for decades. Type 2 diabetes, also diet-driven, is a close follower. Cancer may have been behind these two but it as well has many diet-driven types, but I’m not sure how much those comprise overall rates of cancer.

albertop 4y ago

The cost of lockdowns.

xnx 4y ago

With so many excess deaths due to COVID, should we expect a deficit of deaths in coming years?

tchaffee 4y ago
In that the people who are already dead won't die again? Since they will no longer be counted I would expect numbers to simply return to average among those left living. I doubt the survivors are extra healthy or less susceptible to the normal causes of death.
- taolegal 4y ago
  No, as in those that were going to die in the future, will no longer die in the future. Returning to the average doesn't make sense. There's a fixed amount of deaths that have to be spread across the timeline somehow and logic would tell us that lots of early deaths (concentrated very heavily in the elderly range of the age distribution) will necessarily subtract from the future. Of course there's a ton of other variables at play that could hide this reality.
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    That's not how the math works though. The people who are dead brought the average down because they died at a younger age. The only way to compensate for that would be if those left alive live longer than average. There is no reason to expect that to happen.
    - taolegal 4y ago
      It seems to me like I'm arguing the instantaneous rate of death will be lower afterwards, since there's a swath of elderly people missing from the population, but you're arguing about the average reverting over time (and specifically that it won't revert from the impact of the pandemic). I don't think the premature death impact of covid will be that large compared to, say, obesity or diabetes. So the impact on the average won't be severe & could be easily offset if our public health leaders produced actual positive results. Instead we've got an unhealthy population and no one accepts the blame.

newaccount2021 4y ago

phamilton4 4y ago

I wonder how much of this has to do with COVID and how much has to do with fentanyl. I am shocked that no one is even talking about the excess fentanyl deaths. Also how much of this is attributed to our fading health system?

ajross 4y ago
Everyone is talking about fentanyl. The problem is that overdoses aren't "excess deaths", those show up in hospitals as real data. And they aren't enough to explain the kind of numbers we saw with covid. Surely fentanyl overdoses are a problem, and they get a bunch of coverage. But they absolutely aren't "the real story" behind the covid excess death numbers; that's just your priors arguing in your head.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Fentanyl overdoses and suicides are excess deaths in that they contribute to excess death numbers when they are higher than expected. They just don't account for the full number of excess deaths over the last few years - the lion's share is almost certainly from the virus.
- mitchdoogle 4y ago
  This article about life expectancy specifically lists overdose deaths as a major contributor to decreased life expectancy
  - ajross 4y ago
    The comment I was responding to was positing that the covid "excess deaths" statistics (not the same thing as life expectancy measurements) were confounded by fentanyl overdoses. They are not.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Fentanyl and suicide tend to kill young people, while COVID tends to kill people who are very old (at one point, the average age of a COVID death was greater than the life expectancy number). It's the increasing mortality of young people that really drops life expectancy.

yboris 4y ago

Is life expectancy measured from 5 years old onwards, or from 1 second old? It's frustrating to see numbers thrown around about how much life expectancy rose over the years in the past, only to discover that the average was so low because so many kids never made it past 5 years old. Why would including those deaths be in any way informative for people alive? That average tells me almost nothing about my life expectancy! :( The article never mentions it, but the graph says "at birth" is the starting point.

issa 4y ago
Maybe the article was updated since you read it? It goes into their methodology: "Arias and her colleagues calculated life expectancy using a technique called a period life table. This involved the researchers imagining a group of 100,000 hypothetical infants and applying the death rates observed for the real population in 2021 for each year of those infants’ lives. The result is not the life expectancy for a cohort of actual babies born in 2021 but rather a snapshot of how life expectancy rates would apply to various age groups at a specific point in time, Arias says."
aabaker99 4y ago
"Life expectancy" is short hand for life expectancy at birth, but other life expectancies such as life expectancy at age 65 are also measured. For instance, https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-65.htm https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-65.htm
- tomrod 4y ago
  The conditional distribution of time-to-death is how I interpret it after conversation with my actuary fellow friend. "Conditional on being in this well-defined population, how long until I die in expectation?"
phpisthebest 4y ago
Well that is a problem with all stats reporting. Infant Mortality is another one "journalists" love to beat the US health system over, never highlighting how the different stats are reported by different nations, or other factors that make the US infant Mortality rate naturally higher due to our reporting standards, and standard procedures. Life Expectancy is not really a good guide for anything, it is just a number various political groups can use to influence public policy to their agenda

giantg2 4y ago

"Addressing these gaps in life expectancy would require the U.S. to overhaul its health care system and make it work for everyone, many experts say." Are they even listening to what they, themselves, are saying? Yes, healthcare reforms can help. The economic gaps they previously mentioned are still going to be a problem. It doesn't matter if you have totally free healthcare if you lack any hope for your economic situation. That's where the substance abuse (liver disease, OD, etc), suicide, and other self destructive behaviors are still a problem. Ostensibly, the Healthcare reforms would have the least impact on the overall issue since Medicaid and Medicare are available to Native Americans already, and covid mortality is skewed to the older populations who are eligible for these programs already (although sign-up and other administrative issues may exists).

mrandish 4y ago

When I poke deeper into these type of life expectancy headline claims, I usually find life expectancy is continuing to improve for the typical North American adult who does not: * Abuse drugs or alcohol. * Become obese. * Commit suicide. While the overall statistical decline is unfortunate, the underlying causes result from things already known to shorten lifespan. If you add eating healthy, reasonable exercise and maintaining routine healthcare the numbers improve even more.

credit_guy 4y ago

This is bogus. "Life expectancy" is the number you obtain after you run a statistical model. More precisely the Lee-Carter model [1]. The Lee-Carter model is based on the idea that over more than one hundred years the average annual mortality rate (or rather its logarithm) decreases linearly for all ages and other buckets (sex or race for example). So, you fit a one factor linear model using SVD. Now, after Covid-19, we've had an outlier event. Any linear regression would be thrown out of wack after such an event. Or, to be more technical, any L2 linear regression. What is the predictive power of the Covid event for the future mortality? One can claim that people affected by long Covid will show increased mortality rates in the years and decades to come. Maybe. In any case, the Covid event holds zero predictive power to newborns. And life expectancy is by definition the life expectancy of newborns. Bottom line: this is just a statistical artifact. Life expectancy now is not lower than before Covid. If anything, Covid accelerated some advances in medicine, so life expectancy is higher than the projected increase over 2 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee%E2%80%93Carter_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee%E2%80%93Carter_model

pmoriarty 4y ago
"the Covid event holds zero predictive power to newborns" If their parents, siblings, or grandparents died or suffered long-term health consequences then newborns could be affected in all sorts of ways, up to and including shortening their lifespan. The economic impact of COVID-19 will also affect people's mortality, as fewer opportunities, less earning potential, and economic recession will affect people's health by resulting in poorer health care, unhealthier living conditions and food, and quite possibly depression -- all of which are known to affect lifespan. So I wouldn't be so quick as to rule out any affect on newborns. It's just more complicated than merely saying that X number of newborns died directly due to COVID-19.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  You are right, but all those things can't be predicted by running the Lee-Carter model, which looks at the realized mortality in the past. So, one might say, "There's a possibility future mortality could potentially be higher", this is not the statement made by Scientific American. The statement is "Our evidence tells us the mortality will be higher; it will be about as high as if we turned back time by 26 years". That is absolutely not the case. It's misinterpreting the results of a model that is applied mechanically to data that should not be applied to.