Life expectancy in the U.S. fell for the second year in a row in 2016, a trend that hasn’t happened in other parts of the developed world and was fueled by a 21 percent rise in drug-overdose related deaths.
“With the leveling off of cardiovascular deaths you don’t have that decline to offset the increases seen with drug overdoses,” said Robert Anderson, a chief statistician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “As a result, the drug overdose deaths have risen to prominence and are driving what is happening with overall mortality.”
Life expectancy in 2016 was an average of 78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 years from 2015, according to federal mortality data released Thursday. The study’s researchers say it was the first time life expectancy in the U.S. has dropped two years in a row since declines observed in 1962 and 1963. The latest change was driven by a reduced life expectancy in males, which fell from 76.3 years in 2015 to 76.1 years in 2016.
Anderson and his team have begun monitoring data from 2017 as well. Though it won’t be available publicly until about a year from now, he said he already is beginning to see that deaths from drug overdoses are still rising.
“What we have is provisional and not complete, but we are seeing an increase nonetheless,” he said. “We may be in for a third year of life expectancy decline, which we haven’t seen for 100 years.”
The most recent three-year decline was attributed to the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, one of the deadliest infections in modern history that killed 50 million across the globe.
Data scientists and public health experts have been closely watching mortality figures in the U.S. to see whether the decrease in life expectancy observed in 2015 was a blip or signs of a more worrisome, long-term trend. A study conducted by Princeton economists and spouses Anne Case and Angus Deaton made headlines two years ago when it showed mortality for whites was rising, driven by drug and alcohol overdoses, suicide, chronic liver disease, and cirrhosis.
The latest report on mortality, which uses data compiled by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, adds to that body of research. The CDC study found that the 10 leading causes of death in 2016 remained the same as in 2015, with heart disease and cancer leading the way. But accidents, which include drug overdoses, rose to the third-leading cause of death, surpassing chronic lower respiratory diseases, including those caused by smoking, which dropped to fourth.
Other causes of death also increased, including Alzheimer’s disease and suicide, but the largest increase reported was in deaths from accidents. Deaths from accidents increased by 9.7 percent between 2015 and 2016, while deaths from lower-respiratory illnesses fell by 2.4 percent.
A total of 2,744,248 deaths were recorded in 2016, an increase of 31,618 from 2015. A separate data sheet released Thursday found that deaths from drug overdoses, particularly opioids, had risen to 63,600 in 2016, up from 52,404 the year before.
Synthetic opioids other than methadone, which include the highly potent drug fentanyl, accounted for a increase of more than 10,000 deaths, killing 19,413 people. That total alone accounted for nearly half of all deaths caused by an opioid overdose.
Though Anderson noted that the data show that whites have higher rates of drug overdose than other races, he cautioned that drug overdoses had a large impact on all groups.
“With the drug overdose epidemic, you see it across the board,” he said.
