More people are dying from five of the leading causes of death and life expectancy itself is down in the US, a grim new report reveals.
According to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the last decade, the numbers of people dying in accidents, from Alzheimer’s, liver disease and septicemia as well as by suicide have all gone up.
And that’s not to mention drug overdoses, which continue to climb, rising 72 percent between 2006 and 2016.
Collectively, these dismal death rates have driven life expectancy in the US down for the second year in a row, marking the first downward trend since 1992.
All cause mortality is steady, but deaths from five of the leading killers were higher in 2016 than they had been a decade earlier, according to the CDC’s latest data
Despite the remarkable advancements of modern medicine, deaths of despair and still-mysterious diseases like Alzheimer’s mean Americans are expiring earlier and more often.
Past research has largely attributed the falling life expectancy to the burden of the opioid epidemic and the jaw-dropping number of fatal overdoses occurring every day in the US.
We have mostly been able to take heart that science is steadily catching up to the most common killers.
But the latest figures suggest we may be losing traction.
Rates of heart disease, cancer and lung disease deaths have not worsened.
But 16 percent more people died of unintentional injuries or in accidents in 2016 than did decade earlier.
And as the population’s average age climbs, so do the numbers of people developing and dying from Alzheimer’s disease.
By 2016, the number of fatal cases had increased by a 25 percent over rates in 2006.
Suicide became the tenth leading cause of death for all adults in the US, a ranking it only reached this year – but it is closer to being a to killer of younger people.
Rates are rising for all age, though, according to the CDC’s latest figures.
Suicides were up by nearly a quarter (23 percent) in 2016 over 2017.
A growing number of people may be killing themselves slowly, too, by drinking their livers into failure, the new data suggests.
This is especially true for women. Each year, the number of female Americans dying from liver disease has risen by more than 11 percent every year for the last decade.
Men have fared only a little better. There has been an average increase of 7.9 percent every year over the same period.
This perhaps tracks the notable increase in the number of weekly drinks and total binge drinking sessions that Americans have indulged in in recent years.
Septicemia – a blood infection that can lead to systemic inflammation, or sepsis – doesn’t make the top 10 leading causes of death, but the CDC has included it in its new report, rounding the list out to 12 causes.
That’s because rates of the infection are on the rise in the US, an alarming trend that suggests more people’s primary infections may be going untreated for far too long.
Altogether, these data mean that the future looks less bright – or at least less long for babies born today than it did for those that came into the world a decade ago.
Life expectancy dropped by 0.2 years from 2014 to 2015, and then fell another 0.1 years between 2015 and 2016, the report reveals.