The paper is titled "Falling Behind: The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy Between the United States and Other Countries, 1933–2021" and was
published on Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal American Journal of Public Health. The authors found that US life expectancy reached its highest ranking among world powers in the mid-1950s, after which time it began to slow its growth as well as steadily lose ground to newer industrializing nations, resulting in its middling position today, behind dozens of other nations.
As with many industrialized countries, the US saw dramatic increases in life expectancy in the early 20th century thanks in large part to medical advances such as vaccines, sanitation, and antibiotics. The US was also spared from most of the destruction of the two World Wars, which killed tens of millions in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia, while several hundred thousand American troops were killed, nearly all on overseas battlefields.
By the 1950s, life expectancy in the US had reached 12th in the world, but by 1968 it had already slid to 29th place.
Life expectancy continued to increase though, albeit slightly, but the rate again intensified in 1974, slowing again in the mid-1980s.
By 2014, US life expectancy had peaked at 78.84 years, declining slightly for several years until beginning a more marked decline in 2020 - the year the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Within two years, the respiratory virus had killed at least 1 million people in the US, although some estimates place the number of dead much higher.
The report passes on trying to diagnose factors behind the decline in life expectancy, but some trends noted elsewhere include a steady increase in
drug overdose deaths since the mid-1970s and a dramatic spike in suicide deaths in the 21st century. In 2022, roughly 110,000 deaths were attributed to drug overdoses. In the year prior, the most recent year for which
the CDC has statistics, 48,183 people died by suicide in the US - roughly
twice the number of homicide deaths.
In all,
more than 3.2 million people died in the US in 2022, with the four leading causes of death being heart disease (699,659), cancer (607,790), unintentional injury (218,064), and COVID-19 (186,702).
In part, the academics made their discovery by expanding the international scope of their study beyond the few large industrialized "peer" countries to which the US is typically compared, and including all countries with populations above 500,000, excluding only small city-states.
However, they also found that some parts of the US have seen substantially slower growth than others, with US states in the northeast and the west seeing the fastest growth in life expectancy, while the south, central, and midwestern states lagged behind.
Indeed, other studies on which Woolf has worked have found that
Americans die younger in red states, with suicide, drug overdose, and unhealthy habits driving the death rate up.