Life Expectancy Gender Gap Continues To Widen
By UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
- SAN FRANCISCO
For over a hundred years, we’ve known that females have a longer lifespan than males. However, new research conducted by the University of California, San Francisco, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health reveals that this disparity in life expectancy between genders in the United States has been widening for the past decade.
Contributing factors to this trend include the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid overdose crisis.
In a research paper recently published in the
journal JAMA Internal Medicine, the authors found the difference between how long American men and women
live increased to 5.8 years in 2021, the largest it’s been since 1996. This is
an increase from 4.8 years in 2010 when the gap was at its smallest in recent
history.
Pandemic and Other Factors Affecting Life Expectancy
The pandemic, which took a disproportionate
toll on men, was the biggest contributor to the widening gap from 2019-2021,
followed by unintentional injuries and poisonings (mostly drug overdoses),
accidents, and suicide.
“There’s been a lot of research into the
decline in life expectancy in recent years, but no one has systematically
analyzed why the gap between men and women has been widening since 2010,” said
the paper’s first author, Brandon Yan, MD, MPH, a UCSF internal medicine
resident physician and research collaborator at Harvard Chan School.
Life expectancy in the U.S. dropped in 2021
to 76.1 years, falling from 78.8 years in 2019 and 77 years in 2020.
The shortening lifespan of Americans has been
attributed in part to so-called “deaths of despair.” The term refers to the
increase in deaths from such causes as suicide, drug use disorders, and
alcoholic liver disease, which are often connected with economic hardship,
depression, and stress.
“While rates of death from drug overdose and
homicide have climbed for both men and women, it is clear that men constitute
an increasingly disproportionate share of these deaths,” Yan said.
Interventions
to reverse a deadly trend
Using data from the National Center for
Health Statistics, Yan and fellow researchers from around the country
identified the causes of death that were lowering life expectancy the most.
Then they estimated the effects on men and women to see how much different
causes were contributing to the gap.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the largest
contributors were unintentional injuries, diabetes, suicide, homicide, and
heart disease.
But during the pandemic, men were more likely
to die of the virus. That was likely due to a number
of reasons, including differences in health behaviors, as well as social
factors, such as the risk of exposure at work, reluctance to seek medical care,
incarceration, and housing instability. Chronic metabolic disorders, mental
illness, and gun violence also contributed.
Yan said the results raise questions about
whether more specialized care for men, such as in mental health, should be
developed to address the growing disparity in life expectancy.
“We have brought insights to a worrisome
trend,” Yan said. “Future research ought to help focus public health
interventions towards helping reverse this decline in life expectancy.”
Yan and co-authors, including senior author
Howard Koh, MD, MPH, professor of the practice of public health leadership at
Harvard Chan School, also noted that further analysis is needed to see if these
trends change after 2021.
“We need to track these trends closely as the
pandemic recedes,” Koh said. “And we must make significant investments in
prevention and care to ensure that this widening disparity, among many others,
do not become entrenched.”
Reference: “Widening Gender Gap in Life
Expectancy in the US, 2010-2021” by Brandon W. Yan, Elizabeth Arias, Alan C.
Geller, Donald R. Miller, Kenneth D. Kochanek and Howard K. Koh, 13 November
2023, JAMA Internal Medicine.
DOI:
10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.6041