ODS, suicides lower U.S. life expectancy

NEW YORK — Suicides and drug overdoses pushed up U.S. deaths last year, and drove a continuing decline in how long Americans are expected to live.

There were more than 2.8 million U.S. deaths in 2017, nearly 70,000 more than the previous year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. It was the most deaths in a single year since the government began counting more than a century ago.

The increase partly reflects the nation’s growing and aging population. But it’s deaths in younger age groups — particularly middle-aged people — that have had the largest effect on calculations of life expectancy, experts said.

“These sobering statistics are a wake-up call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC’S director, said in a statement.

The suicide rate last year was the highest in at least 50 years, according to U.S. government records. There were more than 47,000 suicides, up from nearly 45,000 the year before.

For decades, U.S. life expectancy rose a few months nearly every year. It fell in 2015, stayed level in 2016 and declined last year, the CDC said.

The nation is in the longest period of a generally declining life expectancy since the late 1910s, when World War I and the worst flu pandemic in modern history combined to kill nearly 1 million Americans. Life expectancy in 1918 was 39.

Aside from that, “we’ve never really seen anything like this,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees

CDC death statistics.

In the nation’s 10 leading causes of death, only the cancer death rate fell in 2017. There were increases in seven others — suicide, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, flu/pneumonia, chronic lower respiratory diseases and unintentional injuries.

An underlying factor is that the death rate for heart disease — the nation’s No. 1 killer — has stopped falling.

CDC officials did not speculate about what’s behind declining life expectancy, but Dr. William Dietz, a disease prevention expert at George Washington University, sees a sense of hopelessness.

Financial struggles, a widening income gap and divisive politics are all casting a pall over many, he suggested.

“I really do believe that people are increasingly hopeless, and that that leads to drug use, it leads potentially to suicide,” he said.