The length of time that women outlive men in the U.S. has increased by a year due to rising deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, a new study has found.
The gender life expectancy gap increased from a low of 4.8 years in 2020 to 5.8 years in 2021, which is the largest since 1996. Six researchers from San Francisco, Boston, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined federal data and published their study Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
According to the study, the gap increased by 0.23 years from 2010 to 2019 and 0.7 years from 2019 to 2021. Over that period, drug overdoses and COVID deaths among men outpaced deaths related to cancer and general respiratory illnesses, researchers found.
“The main takeaway is that men bear a disproportionate burden in the recent decline in overall life expectancy in the U.S., and for us to reverse the troubling decline in life expectancy in the U.S., understanding and targeting the drivers of increasing mortality among men [are] of important public health relevance,” Dr. Brandon Yan, a co-author of the study and resident physician at University of California, San Francisco, told Newstodayalert.
The study noted that average U.S. life expectancy fell from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77 years in 2020 and 76.1 years in 2021 as COVID-19 became a leading cause of death nationwide.
Before the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, the leading contributor to the worsening life expectancy gap was unintentional injuries or poisonings, including drug overdoses. Researchers said that category made women live 0.23 years more than men.
Next came diabetes (0.05 years), suicide (0.04 years), homicide (0.03 years), and heart disease (0.03).
From 2019 to 2021, the study noted that “COVID-19 became the leading contributor to the widening gender life expectancy gap,” making women live 0.33 years longer than men.
Unintentional poisonings, mainly due to drug overdoses, added 0.27 years to the life expectancy gap between women and men over the same period as the drug overdose epidemic worsened.
According to the study, chronic metabolic illnesses and worsening mental health among men may have also played a role.
“The absolute difference in age-adjusted death rates between men and women increased from 252 to 315 per 100 000 between 2010 and 2021, with a persistent gap for heart disease and widening gaps for COVID-19, unintentional injuries, and several other causes,” the researchers wrote.
Researchers noted that the “increasing maternal deaths among women and the relative reductions in cancer and perinatal conditions among men” kept the gap from growing even more.
According to Dr. Yan, who also serves as a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the study explains the widening gender gap in life expectancy more precisely than previous data.
“Further research into the drivers of increasing mortality among men is needed to inform targeted public health interventions,” he said.
