The United States is trailing its competitors in terms of life expectancy, underperforming 56 countries worldwide, a new study revealed.
The findings, published March 28 in the American Journal of Public Health, show that citizens of Albania, Czechia, Cuba, and Lebanon can now expect to live longer and healthier lives than the average U.S. citizen.
Researchers used groundbreaking new methods to determine the rankings, factoring in data from the United Nations, the Human Mortality Database, and the U.S. Mortality Database to track trends from the past 80 years.
Those resources uncovered that the inflection point for U.S. life expectancy decline was not the 1980s and 1990s like previously believed, but appeared to be a much larger and older public health issue.
Increases in U.S. life expectancy initially slowed in the 1950s through the early 1970s before temporarily rebounding from 1974 to 1982. However, it slowed again from 1983 to 2009.
Life expectancy then flatlined throughout the 2010s before plummeting in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to researchers, 17 countries outranked the U.S. for more than 50 years in the measure.
Steven Woolf, M.D., M.P.H.; director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University; noted that Americans are sicker than many other countries despite spending more on health care.
“Even Americans with healthy behaviors, for example, those who are not obese or do not smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their peers in other countries,” stated Woolf, who led the study.
“We found that countries with different cultures, forms of governance, societies, and economies have all found a way to outperform the United States in terms of health outcomes and life expectancy,” he added.
The study also found significant differences between U.S. regions, with life expectancy generally highest in states throughout the Northeast and West but lowest in the Midwest and South Central.
“Over time, we’ve seen widening disparities in health trends at the state level,” Woolf admitted.
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