US life expectancy varies a lot by county
LIFE expectancy is rising generally in the US, but some areas have seen death rates going conspicuously in the other direction. These geographical disparities are widening, according to a sweeping report published on Monday.
A baby born in Summit County, Colorado, has a life expectancy of nearly 87 years, but in some counties the life expectancy is more than 20 years lower, coming close to that in impoverished and wartorn countries such as Iraq or Sudan.
People are less likely to live longer if they are poor, get little exercise and lack access to health care, but even with those factors taken into account, geography matters, reports the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
“Geographic disparities in life expectancy among US counties are large and increasing,” the authors conclude in the report, titled Inequalities in life expectancy among US counties, 1980 to 2014, and published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The researchers looked at death certificates from 1980 through 2014. Among the places with sharply increased life expectancy and lower deaths over that period are the District of Columbia and Loudoun County, Virginia – where life expectancy is up 12.8 and 12.4 percent, respectively. Fairfax County, Virginia, has the lowest allcause death rate in the metropolitan Washington region, significantly lower than the US average.
Of the 10 counties where life expectancy has dropped the most since 1980, eight are in Kentucky. The other two are in Oklahoma and Alabama. The report includes an interactive map of death rates county by county (and sometimes by city, when a city is not part of a county). The areas with the worst mortality metrics include central Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta and areas in the Dakotas with large Native American populations.
The list of counties with the most improved life expectancy includes a number of remote locations in Alaska, including the North Slope and the Aleutian Islands, and the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as San Francisco.