U.S. life expectancy failed to rise for the third straight year in 2017, a trend that hasn’t been observed in 100 years.
The finding comes from a series of reports released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They showed that drug overdoses and suicides fueled the trend, resulting in earlier deaths and a changed view of how long people in the U.S. can expect to live.
Life expectancy for the U.S. population declined from 78.7 years in 2016 to 78.6 years in 2017. The life expectancy for women was unchanged, at 81.1 years, but for men it decreased from 76.2 years in 2016 to 76.1 years. Rates of death increased most among white men and women, and among adults between the ages of 25 to 34.
“Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” CDC director Robert Redfield said in a statement.
Similar trends have not been observed in other parts of the developed world, and the tendency in the U.S. has otherwise been for life expectancy to increase from year to year because of medical advances and better public health measures.
The data, which come from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, show that 2,813,503 people died in 2017, 69,255 more deaths than in 2016.
Life expectancy has fallen 0.3 years since 2014. The last time life expectancy showed a similar downward slope was in during World War I, when a flu pandemic tore through the population, resulting in 50 million deaths across the globe. Life expectancy fell by a much higher magnitude then, by about a dozen years, said Robert Anderson, a chief statistician at the CDC.
Data scientists and public health experts have been closely watching mortality figures in the U.S. to see whether the decrease in life expectancy first 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 studies on mortality from the CDC add to that body of research, and updates figures from previous years as more data came in from Medicare. It found life expectancy dropped since 2014, stayed stable from 2015 to 2016, and dropped the following year. Aside from the overarching study on mortality, CDC released two more studies, one on drug overdoses and the other on suicides.
Drug overdoses were tied to 70,237 deaths in 2017, an increase of nearly 10 percent from the year before, and opioids such as heroin were responsible for 47,600 of these deaths. The surge was driven by a type of opioid known as fentanyl.
[Also read: Melania Trump says she’s talked to her son Barron about the dangers of opioids]
Deaths from fentanyl grew from 19,413 in 2016 to 28,466 in 2017. Just a salt-shake amount into the palm is enough to kill most people. Other studies have demonstrated that fentanyl is often mixed with other drugs, including heroin and cocaine, sometimes without the knowledge of the person taking them.
Congress and the Trump administration has acted to reverse the surge of deaths from opioids, and preliminary data from the first few months in 2018 suggest a leveling off has occurred, though it is too soon to tell whether that will be a year-long trend. The surgeon general has urged more people to stock naloxone, a drug that reverses and overdose and saves lives, but that is not a cure for addiction.
The Food and Drug Administration has recommended people with addiction seek treatment from a doctor to receive medications such as buprenorphine, which stave off withdrawal symptoms.
Suicide policy hasn’t received the same attention, though Congress did pass a bill earlier this year to reduce the current telephone helpline from 10 digits to three. The bill was passed unanimously by both the Senate and House at a time when federal data revealed that suicides in the U.S. have risen by more than 30 percent since 1999. Suicides were nearly twice as high in the country than they are in cities.
The top 10 leading causes of death remained the same in 2017 as in 2016. They are, in order of prevalence: heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease, and suicide. These factors account for 74 percent of all U.S. deaths.
This story has been corrected to clarify the trend in life expectancy.
