The United States has increasingly fallen behind in its average life expectancy over the past few decades, according to a new report.
The study published in the American Journal of Public Health on Thursday found that a disadvantage in U.S. life expectancy began in the 1950s and has worsened especially during the past four decades as dozens of “globally diverse” countries have performed better.
Steven Woolf, the author of the study and the director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, told USA Today that the problem is “bigger than we ever thought” and many more countries are outperforming the U.S. than previously thought.
He said improvements in health measures like vaccines and sanitation caused the U.S. to experience significant increases in life expectancy in the early 20th century, but a decline started long before many researchers have realized.
The report states that increases in U.S. life expectancy dropped from 0.21 years per year from 1950 to 1954 to 0.1 years per year from 1955 to 1973. It states that the expectancy accelerated to 0.34 years per year from 1974 to 1982 — but the increases dropped from 0.15 years from 1983 to 2009 to 0.06 years from 2010 to 2019.
Life expectancy fell by 0.97 years per year from 2020 to 2021.
But other countries experienced faster growth during each phase that Woolf measured, except for 1974 to 1982. The report found 56 countries on six continents surpassed U.S. life expectancy from 1933 to 2021.
Woolf concluded that the cause appears to have been factors in the Midwest and South, where growth in life expectancy was the slowest.
He told USA Today that most researchers cite the 1980s as when the slow-down in life expectancy began because they have not looked back far enough into historical data.
The researcher based the report on 2022 estimates he received from the United Nations, the Human Mortality Database and U.S. Mortality Database. He calculated the changes in growth rates, the U.S. position compared to other countries and state-level trends.
He said states in the North and West have been performing the best, with states like Hawaii and New York in line with some of the healthiest countries in the world.
Overall life expectancy in the U.S. dropped by 1.8 years from 2019 to 2020, according to most recent data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it was the largest annual decline in 75 years.