Longevity Studies Of Countries

Utah life expectancy leads the nation, but falls behind some struggling countries

SALT LAKE CITY — Life expectancy rates in Utah are some of the highest in the country, but according to a new study , those numbers are continually falling behind other countries in the international race for longevity.

People are living longer across the globe, yet the United States is not keeping pace.

And the closer the look, the discrepancies are even larger. A county-by-county analysis performed by researchers at the University of Washington's Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation identifies areas of the country where neighboring communities have very different life expectancy rates.

Rita Duda of the Ukraine, right, and Luigi Marzano, 97, smile in Rome, Wednesday, June 27, 2007. Italian life expectancy is 78.3 years for men and 84 for women. Life expectancies in more than 80 percent of U.S. counties fell in standing against the average of the 10 nations with the best life expectancies in the world, including Italy, according to the IHME research.

Even within the Salt Lake Valley, the Utah Department of Health has found staggering differences , as individuals living in the Foothill area can expect to live up to eight years longer than their peers in Glendale.

"We think we're so on top of it, but unfortunately, we're only on top of it in certain areas of the country and for certain people," said Dr. Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health at the University of Washington. He said Utah is average in the nation as far as life expectancy goes, but areas within Utah compare to countries such as Puerto Rico, Portugal, Poland and Kuwait.

Experts believe many factors contribute to the local disparities, including vast differences in income and education levels, access or lack thereof to health insurance and quality medical care, as well as efforts taken for prevention.

"For a woman living in Tooele, she'd be better off living in Uruguay or Albania," Mokdad said. Men living in Carbon County, he said, are living in similar conditions to that of the Middle East's Qatar. "And that's scary."

Prior to World War II, life expectancy in the United States was similar to that of Australia, but since then, men and women living in the Land Down Under have surpassed Americans, living four and five years longer, respectively.

"It's all about prevention," Mokdad said, adding that America invests a lot of money in the best available medical technology, but "not in what is really important.

New life-expectancy study hints at socioeconomic disparities

Despite the fact that the United States spends more per capita than any other nation on health care, its citizens continue to slip further behind in life expectancy. Christopher Murray, MD, of the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues reported in Population Health Metrics that the US life expectancy for women is 33rd while that for men is 36th. That’s right. About three dozen developed nations outperform the US in longevity. That’s a lot of countries.

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What this translates to is that life expectancy, on average, is 75.6 years for men, and 80.8 years for women. While the numbers look reasonable, even impressive on first glance, keep in mind that these are rough averages. The study demonstrated deep region-specific disparities. Some counties in certain regions of the country rate so poorly in life expectancy that their rank falls in line with some of the poorer developing nations. The lowest life expectancies were discovered to be in counties in Appalachia, the deep South, and across northern Texas, the researchers said. They dipped as low as 65.9 years for men and 73.5 for women.

Life expectancy rates also were lower in counties in the western U.S. with large Native American populations.

The highest county-level expectancies were in the northern plains and along the Pacific coast, they said.

When compared against an average of 10 nations with the best life expectancy (the "international frontier"), U.S. numbers were lower by 3.2 years -- 13 years behind for men and 16 years behind for women, Murray and colleagues wrote.

When compared at the county level, life expectancies in 2000 ranged from nine years ahead of the international frontier to over 50 years behind for men and from one year ahead to 45 years behind for women.

Granted, average US figures nestle in close proximity to Germany, Finland and Ireland, perfectly respectable countries with a high standard of living. However, the United States is able to achieve that average because some areas of the country are extremely long-lived, on par with places like Japan. The quiet subtext of the study underscores the deep socioeconomic disparities in existence here. These disparities are simply not seen in more egalitarian countries like Finland or Norway. The figures are all the more troubling when per-capita health care expenditures are taken into consideration. If the US spends more per capita on health care than any other country, where is the money going, when it is clearly not serving so many people?