A study compares mortality rates in Europe and the United States. Compared with other wealthy countries, the United States has higher mortality rates and lower life expectancy. Using 2000, 2010, and 2017 data from the Human Mortality Database, Samuel Preston and Yana Vierboom compared age-specific mortality rates in the United States with the combined mortality rates of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and England and Wales. The combined population size of the analyzed European regions is comparable to that of the United States. The authors report that compared with the European regions, relative mortality conditions in the United States worsened significantly since 2000 and resulted in more than 400,000 excess deaths in 2017 alone. The same year, US individuals aged 30-34 years were three times more likely to die than their European counterparts. Overall, the United States experienced 13.02 million years of life lost to excess mortality in 2017, which represents a 64.9% increase since 2000, after adjusting for changes in size and age distribution. The findings suggest that the excess mortality rate in the United States in 2017 represents both a larger number of deaths and of lost years of life than those associated with COVID-19 in 2020, according to the authors.
Article #20-24850: "Excess mortality in the United States in the 21st century," by Samuel H. Preston and Yana C. Vierboom.
MEDIA CONTACT: Samuel H. Preston, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; tel: 610-384-7344, 610-585-3731; email: spreston@pop.upenn.edu ; Yana C. Vierboom, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, GERMANY; email: vierboom@demogr.mpg.de
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences