In 13 counties across the U.S., Americans can now expect to die younger than their parents did. And the eight counties with the largest declines in life expectancy since 1980 are all in the state of Kentucky.
That’s according to a new study out Monday in the journal JAMA: Internal Medicine, for which researchers examined geographic changes and inequality in life expectancy across the U.S. [...]
The three longest-living counties were all in Colorado: Summit, Eagle, and Pitkin, which are home to wealthy, outdoorsy enclaves such as Vail and Breckenridge. There, people live until they’re about 86, on average.
Interestingly, the study finds that the risk of dying under age 5 dropped in all counties since 1980, possibly thanks to programs that target improving the health of infants and children. Meanwhile, the risk of death between the ages of 25 and 45 rose in about 12 percent of all U.S. counties. [...]
Kentucky has one of the highest rates of death from drug overdoses, with about 30 deaths per 100,000 people. Owsley County is the country’s poorest white-majority county, according to a 2016 analysis by Al Jazeera, with about 45 percent of its roughly 4,500 residents living in poverty. The decline of coal mines and tobacco fields have battered the county, whose population peaked in 1940. (Indeed, the JAMA study authors acknowledge that part of the life expectancy trends might be due to healthy people moving away from blighted areas, and “high-risk” people remaining in them.)
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