james_nicoll: There's a headline that catches the eye

james_nicoll (

james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2008-04-23 10:28:00

There's a headline that catches the eye
US Life Expectancy Falls for Large Segment of Population

Would anyone know if PLoS is a reputable source?

[Update: Yes, it is]

[Added Later]

Between 1983 and 1999, male and female life expectancies had statistically significant decline in 11 and 180 counties, respectively (0.5% and 3.0% of the male and female populations); average decline in these counties was 1.3 y for both men and women. Another 48 and 783 counties had nonsignificant life expectancy decline for men and women (0.4% and 8.8% of the male and female populations), respectively. The average life expectancy decline in these counties was 0.5 y for women and 0.4 y for men, but these were not statistically significant because these counties were relatively small. Of the counties with statistically significant life expectancy decline, all for males and all but seven for females were in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas. There were also a number of counties with significant female life expectancy decline in the Rocky Mountain area and the Four Corners region, and one in Maine. Between 1983 and 1999, above-average mortality gain also became geographically more concentrated, and shifted to the Northeastern and Pacific Coast counties.

[I really would have expected this to get more comments than the Gropening post]

(Post a new comment)

luna_the_cat
2008-04-23 02:41 pm UTC (link)

Yes, it is. The Public Library of Science journals are peer-reviewed and I am familiar with the professional reputations of some of the editors. I also regularly use PLoS One/PLoS Biology as a source of resources for my work.

The free PLoS journals were originally set up to give doctors and researchers in 3rd World and poorer nations access to research which they would not be able to afford in subscription journals.

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	thette 2008-04-23 02:53 pm UTC (link)
	I agree. Hans-Olov Adami, head of the epidemiology department where I used to work and a member of the Nobel Prize Assembly, was involved in starting up the PLoS Medicine journal. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mjlayman 2008-04-23 11:57 pm UTC (link)
	So, um, do they use an assembly line? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	micheinnz 2008-04-25 01:28 am UTC (link)
	What, like "Do you come here often?" Or is that a different kind of line? ;) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mjlayman 2008-04-25 01:31 am UTC (link)
	I think "Do you come here often" might be anti-assembly! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	vito_excalibur 2008-04-23 04:09 pm UTC (link)
	SSC: I momentarily understood it as the title of a meta love story. (Reply to this)

carloshasanax
2008-04-23 04:36 pm UTC (link)

My thought processes at work:

1) looking at the map in the paper: that's the Wal-Mart belt. (And truly it is: Bentonville, Arkansas is smack in the area described.)

2) looking at the causes of death: there's an increase in cancer and heart and lung problems associated with smoking.

3) quip module: cheap ciggies at Wal-Mart!

4) check Google: oh, goodness, the activists have already beat that one to death.

5) decide not to comment.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	james_nicoll 2008-04-23 04:56 pm UTC (link)
	Ontario cut the taxes on coffin nails a few years back. I wonder if that had a measurable effect on life expectancy? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

carloshasanax
2008-04-24 09:01 pm UTC (link)

Probably. There was a recent paper which showed that the free cigarettes included in US Army rations during World War Two significantly increased veterans' postwar deaths.

[rummages]

"The Long-Term Impact of Military Service on Health: Evidence from World War II and Korean War Veterans," Bedard and Deschênes. Around half of all "excess" veteran deaths, in fact.

The specific causes of death contributing to the rise in women's mortality in this study scream out "cigarettes!" Unless women are huffing asbestos in Mississippi.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	mjlayman 2008-04-24 12:06 am UTC (link)
	Tsk! Look at the map again! The decreasing counties are inthe tornado belt! Clearly the tornados bring more death! (Reply to this)(Parent)

derekl1963
2008-04-24 05:15 pm UTC (link)

Much of that belt also a) has gotten hit very hard by the move of manufacturing overseas and b) hasn't gotten much in the way of an economic boost like much of the rest of the Sun[nier] Belt.

Also, I wonder if life expectancy isn't going down because folks who can are headed to more clement economic climes, and retirees from that region who can are headed to other places. (I.E. it is not so much that life expectancy is declining, but that factors that masked the life expectancy of that demographic are melting.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

carloshasanax
2008-04-24 10:45 pm UTC (link)

The causes of increased mortality are given in the paper. It's hard to connect deaths from lung cancer and pulmonary disease with economic decline. However, they do really well with smoking.

There's a smaller fraction due to diabetes -- likely, an increase in carbohydrate-heavy diet -- and a fraction among men (not women) due to an increase in homicide and AIDS deaths.

Also, deaths from cardiovascular disease stopped their decline. It's also the Stuckey's belt. (Or Shoney's. I always get those two confused.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	james_nicoll 2008-04-23 04:37 pm UTC (link)
	Of the counties with statistically significant life expectancy decline, all for males and all but seven for females were in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas. Ah, the states that I was assured back in 2003 had become the most dynamic and growing states in the Union. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	llennhoff 2008-04-23 04:55 pm UTC (link)
	And so they are - they are fully participating in capitalism's whirlwind of creative destruction. They aren't held back by the whining nostalgia of 80 75 70 year olds. OBSNL: Here at we believe it is the quality of life that counts - not the quantity. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	carloshasanax 2008-04-23 05:24 pm UTC (link)
	Whatever happened to McCutchen, anyway? I assume he didn't actually die of shame. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	james_nicoll 2008-04-23 06:40 pm UTC (link)
	I think he got tired of being hammered for his support of Team Evil and found a less hostile venue to hang out in. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	tsm_in_toronto 2008-04-23 10:21 pm UTC (link)
	Is this someone who has been here in the last eight months (I arrived here last September or so, but can't vividly recall any voiciferous -- heck, any -- defenders of the Conservative Party of Canada in this forum)? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mjlayman 2008-04-24 12:00 am UTC (link)
	No, Pete's a USan and used to fight us like crazy on the conservative sides of situations in Usenet. Before he stopped posting (and now I'm on a break), I got to where I just didn't read his posts if the thread was political at all. There was no opening for sense. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	tsm_in_toronto 2008-04-24 12:05 am UTC (link)
	Thanks. I was mistakenly under the impression -- based on my sampling of its use by him in this forum, that James had reserved the 'Team Evil' moniker exclusively to mock the Conservative Party of Canada (I notice he typically says Repugs when talking about the RNC), hence my confusion. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mjlayman 2008-04-24 12:12 am UTC (link)
	Pete lives near DC, like me, and from his arguments, I'm sure he's USan. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	derekl1963 2008-04-24 05:18 pm UTC (link)
	Those states had been such from the 60's onward through the 90's - lots of cheap labor and lots of state and federal money eager to lure industry and jobs into those areas. But the flight of industry overseas, and the move to the dotcom/service economy changed that. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	wild_patience 2008-04-23 04:50 pm UTC (link)
	Interesting -- the headline in our local paper yesterday was about how life expectancy in our area (California) had increased. You had to read the article and see the map inside on a different page to see that it had fallen in other places, particularly the southern US states. Location, location, location. (Reply to this)

bpholden
2008-04-23 07:25 pm UTC (link)

What is really weird, to me, is that the bin that shows a decrease in life expectancy, shows it in the end of survey value, not the beginning of survey value. I guess I have to read their simulation of internal migration.

I am puzzled that they did not show the correlations with income, I thought it was pretty well known that more money means a longer life and you can certainly see it the data in some average sense. Maybe this also is discussed in the migration section.

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fanw
2008-04-23 07:38 pm UTC (link)

More specifically, Ezzati and Murray are both well-respected authors. This is closely related to the mortality work I did for my thesis.

But there's an important thing to add here. They say that life expectancy has dropped in a couple hundred counties. Well, in how many has it risen? We have over three thousand counties in the US and I'll warrant most of them experienced a life expectancy INcrease.

The point of this paper is not that we are losing years on average as a nation, but that the disparity in health is increasing.

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	james_nicoll 2008-04-23 07:55 pm UTC (link)
	Is that surprising? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

fanw
2008-04-23 07:59 pm UTC (link)

Yes, and no. At some level, with the population of this nation continuing to grow, you could expect the disparity to rise even if the life expectancy rises in each group (just to differing amounts). The fact that life expectancy fell IS surprising, because that not only means that we are failing to provide the benefits of modern medicine, but we're not even meeting the old standards.

So yes, this is news, even if it affects a smallish proportion of the population.

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(Anonymous)
2008-04-23 11:08 pm UTC (link)

Looking at the stats (figure 4) it's pretty clear that smoking played a big part in the decrease in longevity among women in 83-99. (50% lung cancer etc, 50% diabetes etc.) Men had a big change here in 61-83 but it was pretty much a wash in 83-99.

Just looking at the county outlines on the map I see a metropolitan area-rural divide, but their tables say not. The "counties" (there's about 3000 total, but the study amalgamates them into about 2000 for various reasons) showing small increases in mortality definitely had much lower populations, on average, than the others.

- Michael (just to distinguish me from other anon posters)

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	(Anonymous) 2008-04-24 12:22 am UTC (link)
	if you look at one of the power points at 400% magnification, you can pick out a huge difference between Baltimore City and Baltimore county. (Opposite trends) ~Sled Reference (Reply to this)(Parent)

mmcirvin
2008-04-24 11:23 am UTC (link)

My first reaction to the story was to note how not-surprising it was.

There's a common line that increasing inequality in the US is simply the price we pay for progress: if things are getting better for everyone, then complaining that disparity is increasing is just a manifestation of envy. But this assumes implicitly that things are getting better for everyone, that things are actually not as good for everyone in places with lower inequality, and that inequality itself doesn't create problems in an absolute sense for the people at the bottom. And these assumptions are by no means clear to me.

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	talheres 2008-04-23 08:38 pm UTC (link)
	They had a pretty good critique of Temple Grandin's truth claim about animals awhile back, but I thought it was always pretty damn obvious that they're not autistic savants, much less think like her. People who fall for Animals in Translation know little about biology, and it certainly does not reflect well on the author herself. (Reply to this)

	mjlayman 2008-04-23 11:56 pm UTC (link)
	I only just read your post! Yeah, it was on TV and in the WashPost today, and seems not only well-researched, but sensible. (Reply to this)

maruad
2008-04-24 04:04 am UTC (link)

Changes in diet, lifestyle, increased exposure to trace levels of toxic chemicals and heavy metals and age demographics would all seem to be factors I would consider.

Increased prosperity and changes to farming/lawncare practices/inputs could be factors. So could increased exposure to emmissions from vehicles and power plants.

Are more people getting killed in car accidents/gun violence.

I suspect there are lots of other factors.

Overlaying a larger copy of these maps with geographic information showing things about water supply (where is their water from), what pollution sources the hotspots are downwind/river and % of family food buget allocated to eating at fastfood or roadhouse restuarants would be interesting. Distribution of registered (and unregistered weapons) would also be of interest.

This is fun stuff for social geography freaks I would think. Find a grad student who has time and access to decent mapping software, pick a few key counties and analyze away.

(Reply to this)

	carloshasanax 2008-04-25 01:45 am UTC (link)
	Here's a map showing people who identify their ethnic origin as "American" in the last census: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2055/2419005102_ffaeca8c56_o.png It's fairly close to the increased mortality area. Interesting, no? (Reply to this)

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