Americans Fall Behind In The 'Getting Older' Race
npr.org
npr.org
Put simply, Americans have an anomalously high rate of dying when they are young due to homicide and accidents, particularly vehicular. These are large statistical outliers compared to the rest of the industrialized world. This negatively alters the average life expectancy but does not say much about the life expectancy in the individual case.
If you control for just homicide and vehicular accidents, Americans have among the highest life expectancy in the world despite issues like obesity, and many Americans have negligible risk of those causes of premature death. In terms of deaths due to medical issues (cancer, heart disease, etc), Americans have the highest life expectancy in the world, which offsets the homicide and accident death rates among the young.
There used to be a saying by the people that study life expectancy statistics that the only people on Earth that live longer than Japanese women are Japanese women living in the US. Which is true and captured an essential point about the mixture of factors in life expectancy statistics.
Consider an 5 month old fetus who completely passed through the vagina, takes one breath and dies. Is that infant mortality or miscarriage? Now make it 6 months old, but he didn't take any breaths. Or 7 months, the head (but not body) passed through the vagina, then he dies. Or 7 months, body but not head passed through vagina. If you want to draw distinctions between miscarriage and infant mortality you need to draw a more or less arbitrary line. Not every nation draws the line in the same place and the statistics are therefore incomparable.
You are right about the effect this has on the statistics. I'm just suggesting that there are far less nefarious reasons than misreporting stats.
Also, calling a fully-born human being a fetus is both inaccurate and even more harsh than this use of the word "misreporting".
For the sake of furthering on-topic discussion, let's all agree that infant mortality is a different problem than longevity and therefore a better measure than "life expectancy from birth" would be "life expectancy from age 1" or something along those lines.
Right away, they found our weak spot. "U.S. women have
relatively high mortality rates at the younger older ages,"
they said, which means when women hit their 55th birthdays,
for the next almost 20 years, roughly 55 to 75, they will
die more often than women in comparable countries. Americans
get more lung disease, more heart disease, more diabetes. If
Americans reach 75, they get competitive again, but that
early old age is where we lose ground. American men showed
pretty much the same weakness at roughly the same times.
Did you not see that part, or did you have some disagreement with it? I have not read the full report that it was based on yet, so I can't comment in detail: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62373/
Except that, as noted in the NIH study cited in the report [1], the US has, over the past several decades, been progressively falling behind other OECD countries in life expectancy at age 50 in both genders, because of a higher mortality rate at the younger end of the 50+ scale. So, no, its just not about Americans getting killed (whether in accidents and homicides or any other way) at a young age.
As far as I can tell from the article, these life expectancy numbers do not compensate for suicide, homicide, premature births (some countries don't count them as births), and accidental death (as in car accidents).
I would like to see more of the same charts, but instead of just graphing life expectancy at birth, graph life expectancy from ages 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, and so on. I would compare the "Life Expectancy from Age X" graph for the U.S. against the same graphs for other countries. Then I would look at leading causes of death for each age group in the U.S. Then I would have a much more quantifiable idea of why citizens in other countries tend to live longer than U.S. citizens.
Here's an interesting podcasts where a couple of economists discuss this kind of metric as a measure of longevity and health: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/07/scott_atlas_on.html
EDIT: This is important because counting thousands of premature births and having a much higher rate of death due to accidents and violence will really wreck the U.S. average. In that case, talking about how Americans eat too much red meat is mostly beside the point.
The article itself notes: In 2011, the National Institutes of Health issued a report that tried to make sense of it all. Right away, they found our weak spot. "U.S. women have relatively high mortality rates at the younger older ages," they said, which means when women hit their 55th birthdays, for the next almost 20 years, roughly 55 to 75, they will die more often than women in comparable countries. Americans get more lung disease, more heart disease, more diabetes. If Americans reach 75, they get competitive again, but that early old age is where we lose ground. American men showed pretty much the same weakness at roughly the same times.
And the NIH study [1] linked in the article actually has the kind of charts that you suggest should be done comparing life expectancy at various ages.
It would maybe help if instead of reciting canned arguments based assumptions generated by the title, people would actually read the linked articles.
"The NIH report says that in 2002, 2003 and 2004, life expectancy in France increased by 10 months, which is a crazy pace (and I'm guessing it hasn't stayed that way)."
The likeliest explanation for a jump that large is a change in methodology, but there could be other factors (climate? there was a big heat wave in 2003). The U.S. does have a different culture and climate than these other countries.
I'm very happy to read an article that discusses the complexity of comparing life expectancies between countries, but the NPR article wasn't it and the HN comment section is just now getting to the point where people are discussing what the numbers really mean.
The podcast I linked is more along those lines as well, but it also goes into other popular measurements of national health as well, if I recall correctly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Robert Lustig is the man to explain all this. He blames fructose (i.e. corn stuff) and fully expects this generation of Americans to have a shorter lifespan than previous generations could expect.
That doesn't seem to address the fact that as a nation, the US seems to be growing more and more obese with worse nutrition and less exercise. I assume the authors of the paper did some analysis based on things other than the inefficient health care system.
Let's get it up to twelve months per year!
Each year the chance of someone dying in a vehicular accident is about 1 in 10,000 in the US. Over 80 years that means a citizen has roughly a 1 / 125 chance of dying in a vehicular accident. The total reduction in life expectancy from vehicular accidents is thus well under 1.0 years. Assume, for example that such an accident cuts an average of 60 years off a person's life -- they would have lived to 80, say, but their life was cut short at just 20 years old. That works out as a 0.5 year reduction in life expectancy due to accidents.
This is without taking into account the vehicular fatality rates in other countries. When you do that for, e.g., Japan (1 in 20,000 per year), the difference in life expectancy is likely around 0.25 years.
The homicide rate in the US is about 1 in 20,000 people per year, or about half the vehicular fatality rate, so perhaps a further 0.25 year reduction, without factoring in homicides in other countries.
For infant mortality, the chance of dying at birth is a little over 1 in 200 in the US. That translates to a reduction in life expectancy of about 0.4 years, without factoring in infant mortality in other countries.
A similar analysis shows suicide rates are probably not a factor -- in fact, in some countries, such as Japan, the rate is higher than in the US, while in countries such as the UK it is comparable to the US.
So the contributions from all four of these sources is very unlikely to be more than a 1 year difference in life expectancy. It's probably quite a bit less, since I've ignored (e.g.) infant mortality in other countries. Certainly, the contribution from all four of these is nowhere near the dominant effect to explain differences in life expectancy.
A caveat: some people pointing to infant mortality are claiming that what's going on is that a large number of stillbirths simply aren't being reported in some countries outside the US, and this is skewing the results. That possibility isn't accounted for in my analysis above. I doubt it's true - in my many years living in Canada and Australia I've known quite a few people who died in car accidents, and none of whom had a stillbirth (to my knowledge). But while this suggests to me that this effect isn't large, it's of course only anecdotal evidence.
Sources for rates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mor...
And if you want to look at the details of the suicide statistics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...
I can only hope that's some bad statistics whereas your chances are disproportionally high while you're a teenager but if you make it past that, you're ok...
I have kids who will be driving age in 10 years. If there is a self driving car widely available by then, and I suspect there will be, I will look to the heavens and praise Science.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/15/car-crash-victim-runs-to-p...
America is home to a lot of different races. Look at the races of the population over 80 and how it changed since 1950s.
Besides, race and poverty are so closely linked in the US that, even if this were true, it still doesn't say anything about the intrinsic properties of different races. Implying that it does is a racist statement.
Now how much of it is genetic vs lifestyle and cultural is a different story. It's not easy to tease apart genotype vs phenotype arguments or nature vs nurture. But I don't think I would take offense to ACTUALLY 90% TRUE generalizations about MY race and ethnicity, and I don't think others should, either.
That's different than saying POTENTIALY UNTRUE things based on anecdotal evidence, such as that Mexicans are usually bad at physics, that women bad at programming or that Jews are averse to taking low paid menial jobs. Disclaimer: I am Jewish. But I have no issue discussing things dispassionately like that. However I am sensitive to how they are presented, and MORE imporyantly careful ny to perpetuate harmful stereotypes that are possibly untrue or may cause people to actually suffer as a result.
"How long does it take to die?"
"A lifetime."