Life Expectancy For Women In Some Southern States Has Barely Budged In More Than 100 Years
(NBC News, Lindsey Leake) —
How long you live depends on where you live, new research suggests.
Americans’ life expectancy increased throughout the 20th century, although in some states, particularly in the South, people aren’t living much longer than they were 100 years ago. It’s worse among women.
Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health analyzed the death data of 77 million women and 102 million men born from 1900 through 2000. The findings, published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open, showed that nationwide life expectancy for women increased from 73.8 to 84.1 in that time frame, while it jumped from 62.8 to 80.3 for men.
Scientists and health officials calculate life expectancy at birth as a way of understanding a country’s health over time. How long people in the United States lived since the last century varied drastically by state.
“What was surprising to me was that for some states, especially for women, there’s basically no change,” said study co-author Theodore Holford, a senior research scientist in biostatistics at Yale University. “Over 100 years, in some of these Southern states, they improved less than two years in the framework of all of the medical advances that we have seen during the 20th century.”
The bottom five states for life expectancy among women born in 2000, compared to women born in 1900, are:
- West Virginia, 75.3, up from 74.3.
- Oklahoma, 76, down from 76.7.
- Kentucky, 76.5, up from 74.9.
- Mississippi, 76.6, up from 73.2.
- Arkansas, 76.6, up from 75.7.
Southern men born in 2000 also tended to have lower life expectancies, though they showed greater improvements than women since 1900:
- Mississippi, 71.8, up from 62.3.
- West Virginia, 72.6, up from 63.7.
- Alabama, 72.6, up from 62.5.
- Louisiana, 72.9, up from 61.5.
- Tennessee 73.4, up from 63.6.
Not all Southern states show lower or stalled life expectancies for people born in 2000.
Florida, Texas and Virginia are among the Southern states featured in the top 20 of life expectancy for both men and women born in 2000.
States outside the South that ranked in the bottom 10 for both sexes include Ohio and Indiana.
The study also highlights life expectancy by state and sex at the midway point of 1950.
Men in particular showed greater improvement during the first half of the century. In North Dakota, for example, male life expectancy jumped 10 years from 66.4 in 1900 to 76.5 in 1950, but only one year, 77.8, from 1950 to 2000.
Data reflects the state in which a person died, not where they were born.
It’s well-established that women live longer than men, but this latest research unveils geographic disparities in life expectancy at a turning point in federal public health administration. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lamented the state of the nation’s health care system in an April 10 statement that was also published in the New York Post.
“Our country’s health is declining. America has the highest rates of chronic disease in the world,” Kennedy said. “We rank last in terms of health among developed nations. And life expectancy is declining for many groups of Americans.”
Why is life expectancy lower in the South?
The Yale study claims to be the first to analyze historic state mortality trends by birth cohort, meaning entire generations are tracked.
Population health research more commonly involves a metric called period life expectancy, which estimates influences on mortality over a select year, such as during a pandemic.
“The idea here is to try to pick up on generational factors,” Holford said. “There are lots of factors related to health that are more closely tied to generations than a calendar year.”