The focus on middle-aged whites intensified when a pair of Princeton University economists – Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case – published a blockbuster article previous year showing that since 1999, death rates had increased specifically among non-Latino white Americans ages 45 to 54. About 40% of the mortality gap is due to the suicide and substance abuse cases, while the remaining 60% gap still remains attributed to the primary death causes of middle-aged whites. By contrast, the death rate fell by 11 percent from 1999 to 2014. The researchers have said that some countries, which showed the worst trends, also with a high poverty rate and the highest rates of smoking and obesity in the nation.
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Initial reports pegged this to a much higher number of drug-related deaths and suicides, but as it turns out, the cause is much simpler.
The states of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee turned the worst rates in non-Hispanic whites.
After Commonwealth analysis, death rates would have been expected for that group, falling by 1.8 per cent annually, but mortality in 2014 led to more than 100 additional deaths per 100,000 middle-aged white adults. Death rate in non-Hispanic white Americans, aged 22-56 years, has increased from 1999 to 2014, with death rate reaching its highest point at the age of approximately 30-50 years. The death gap was especially pronounced in West Virginia, where mortality rates were at their highest since 1980.
However, Blumenthal says that for middle-aged white Americans, that progress in combating diseases has stalled, and even gone backward for some conditions.
Heart attack is the second leading cause of death in white middle aged people in United States. She wrote that for a number of social and economic indicators, white middle-aged are behind in the 21st century falls, because they are less busy lower incomes and are less married. Georgia, however, fared a bit better with 49 extra deaths per 100,000, according to Commonwealth researchers.
According to the author of the study and the president of the Commonwealth Fund, David Blumenthal, diseases are discovered and treated at a normal pace, but this happens with new illnesses or medical conditions that seem like a bigger threat than high cholesterol induced heart problems.
Not only are middle aged white folk dying younger and younger, but the death rates have also increased, meaning that more and more of them are dying as well.
“We are witnessing regression that has little precedent in the industrialized world over the past half century”.
According to the authors of the report, the fact that the death rates of middle aged white Americans have been increasing is alarming and they suggest that they are caused by the lack of healthcare.
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Contrary to that, the gap between projected and real mortality rates was least in California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Minnesota.
