A new study into midlife mortality across high-income countries has found that the number of middle-aged adults dying in the US is concerning.
The research, published in the Journal of Epidemiology, revealed that most countries have seen a significant decline in midlife mortality – but not America.
Midlife death rate highest in the US
Researchers from the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS) and Princeton University found that US working-age adults are dying at higher rates than their peers in other high-income countries.
They used annual mortality data from the World Health Organization Mortality Database to compare trends in midlife mortality for adults aged 25-64 between 1990 and 2019 across 15 major causes of death in 18 high-income countries.
This included the USA, UK, 13 countries in Western Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan and seven Central and Eastern European countries. The study found that in most of these nations, the number of middle-aged people dying is falling.
However, US midlife mortality has “worsened significantly” since 1990 relative to the other high-income peers. In 2019, more men and women aged 25-44 were dying in the US than any other country in the study, with death rates 2.5 times higher.
The research reveals that US midlife mortality rates have worsened since 1990 for several causes of death including drug-related, alcohol-related, suicide, metabolic diseases, nervous system diseases, respiratory diseases and infectious/parasitic diseases.
Author says results are ‘surprising’
Dr Katarzyna Doniec, Postdoctoral Researcher at LCDS and author of the study, said the study’s results are “surprising”.
“Over the past three decades midlife mortality in the US has worsened significantly compared to other high-income countries, and for the younger 25 to 44 year old age-group in 2019 it even surpassed midlife mortality rates for Central and Eastern European countries,” she said.
“This is surprising, given that not so long ago some of these countries experienced high levels of working-age mortality, resulting from the post-socialist crisis of the 1990s.”
The study also found that US females aged 25-44 years old were the only group across the 18 countries studied who had higher mortality rates in 2019 than in 1990. Every other group and country’s mortality rates have declined.
It concluded that there is “significant room for mortality improvement” in the USA.
