Expect to live longer, yes, above 90
Study in 35 countries shows Korean women projected to have the longest life expectancy
We all can expect to live longer, and South Korean women will be the first in the world to have an average life expectancy above 90 years of age
A new study by Imperial College London and the World Health Organisation analysed life spans in 35 industrialised countries.
It predicted all would see people living longer in 2030 and the gap between men and women would start to close in most countries.
The researchers said the findings posed big challenges for pensions and care for elderly people.
“South Korea has gotten a lot of things right,” Prof Majid Ezzati said. “They seem to have been a more equal place and things that have benefited people — education, nutrition — have benefited most people.
“And so far, they are better at dealing with hypertension and have some of the lowest obesity rates in the world.” Korean women are projected to have the longest life expectancy.
The data also forecasts that Japan, once the picture of longevity, will tumble down the global rankings.
The US also performs poorly and is on course to have the lowest life expectancy of rich countries by 2030.
The study predicts an average age of 80 for men and 83 for women — roughly the same state Mexico and Croatia will have achieved.
“They are almost opposite of South Korea,” added Prof Ezzati. “[Society in the US is] very unequal to an extent the whole national performance is affected — it is the only country without universal health insurance.
There is a chance that South Korean women will live to an average of 90 years old by 2030, which would be the first time a population will break the 90-year barrier. ife expectancy at birth will continue to climb substantially for residents of industrialised nations — but not in the United States, where minimal gains will soon put lifespans on a par with those in Mexico and the Czech Republic, according to an extensive analysis released on Tuesday.
South Korean women and Hungarian men are projected to make the largest overall gains (with South Koreans second among males). There is a better-than-even chance that South Korean women will live to an average of 90 years old by 2030, which would be the first time a population will break the 90-year barrier, according to the research published in The Lancet.
Not so in the United States. “Notable among poor-performing countries is the USA,” the researchers wrote, “whose life expectancy at birth is already lower than most other high-income countries, and is projected to fall further behind, such that its 2030 life expectancy at birth might be similar to the Czech Republic for men, and Croatia and Mexico for women.”
Americans will gain only a couple of years of life expectancy between 2010 and 2030, the study predicted, keeping lifespans in the early 80s for women and late 70s for men. The study projects a life expectancy of 83.3 for women in the United States and 79.5 for men in 2030, up from 81.2 for women and 76.5 for men in 2010.
The reasons for the United States’ lag are well known. It has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates of any of the countries in the study, as well as the highest obesity rate. It is the only one without universal health insurance coverage and has the “largest share of unmet health-care needs due to financial costs,” the researchers wrote.
Tellingly, the United States was the first high-income country to see a halt to the pattern of increasing height in adulthood, a reliable indicator of improving public health, according to Majid Ezzati, a professor of public health at Imperial College London, who lead the research team.
Some Americans get a “bad start to life in nutrition and education” and suffer “high rates of homicide”, Ezzati said. “And then lack of universal insurance. Some people probably get diagnosed too little and too late.”
“If you have good insurance and you live on the East Coast and the West Coast, you probably get the best health care in the world,” he added. “It’s not the technical quality of it, which is superb. It’s the spread of it.” In many parts of the country, top health care simply isn’t available.
In December, the US government reported that life expectancy had declined in 2015 for the first time since 1993 as death rates for eight of the 10 leading causes of death, including heart disease, rose.
In 2015, research by Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton brought worldwide attention to the unexpected jump in mortality rates among white middle-aged Americans. That trend was blamed on what are sometimes called diseases of despair: overdoses, alcoholism and suicide.
Demographer Sam Preston, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has conducted numerous studies on this subject, cited the prescription opioid epidemic, homicides, obesity and the lingering effects of smoking — the latter now declining among many groups in the United States — as primary causes for the poor showing.
“It’s very worrisome,” said Preston, who was not involved in the new research. “The US is at the bottom of the