US whites’ lives at risk from ‘deaths of despair’
Print Edition
RISING drug and alcohol overdoses, suicides, and disease from chronic alcoholism — labeled “deaths of despair” by one expert — are cutting the lives of white Americans short by nearly half a year on average.
Increases in these types of deaths among whites mean that life expectancy for whites is not increasing as fast as it is for other groups, according to a government report that offers an unusual look at how different threats are affecting US lifespans.
“Things are moving in the wrong direction,” said Anne Case, a Princeton University researcher, of what she calls “deaths of despair.”
Drawing from death certificate data, the new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention focuses on what happened to white life expectancy between 2000 and 2014.
The work was a reaction to recent research that suggested drug overdoses and suicides have caused alarming increases in death rates for middle-aged white Americans. The new report, which did not perform the same analysis for blacks and Hispanics, was posted online yesterday.
Overall, white life expectancy still grew because other things were improving. Deaths from heart disease — the nation’s No. 1 killer — fell sharply, and that alone added a year to white life expectancy. Nearly one more year was added because of falling death rates from cancer, stroke, and motor vehicle crashes, the researchers found.
But then drugs and alcohol subtracted about 4 months from life expectancy, said Kenneth Kochanek, a CDC statistician who was the report’s lead author. No other cause of death had a bigger negative impact, he said.
Rising suicides had the second largest negative impact, subtracting 6 weeks from white life expectancy. The growing impact of Alzheimer’s disease was third, reducing longevity by about 3 weeks.
Falls also whittled down white life expectancy gains, the researchers found. So did chronic liver disease, often the result of heavy alcohol consumption or injection drug use that spreads the liver-destroying hepatitis C virus.
Experts cite several possible reasons that drug overdose deaths and suicides are occurring far more often among middle-aged whites than other groups. They say whites have had an easier time getting access to the powerful painkillers that have been the root of the current drug overdose epidemic. And whites may more quickly turn to suicide because often they don’t have the kind of family and social support often seen in black and Hispanic communities, they say.
Though the gap is closing, white life expectancy is still significantly greater than life expectancy for blacks.
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