Health officials say the US death rate rose slightly past year – the first increase in a decade.
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Researchers think the increase is due to a combination of factors. Last month, the CDC released statistics that showed that non-Hispanic white Americans life expectancy had decreased for the first time in decades. It usually drops. Meanwhile, deaths rates for accidental injuries and some other causes increased. Anderson pointed out that the death rate from heart disease, which had been declining for decades – and offsetting the rises in drug deaths, for example – flattened. They are based on a preliminary look at 2015 death certificates.
The number of Alzheimer’s disease-related deaths moved up from 25.4 deaths per 100,000 people to 29.2 a year ago.
And suicide rates in 2015 were 13.1 per 100,000 people, compared with 12.7 in 2014. Late a year ago, a Princeton University team found that mortality and morbidity had gradually increased for the subset of the population from 1999 to 2013 – mostly due to drugs, alcohol, suicide and other causes. That pattern was the same when the death rate was adjusted for age.
Barry said the increase in suicide deaths is indicative of the country’s broken mental health system.
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Diseases such as cancer and heart disease were by far the two most common causes of death, taking 185.1 lives and 196.2 lives per every 100,000, respectively. “We expect this to hold”, she said.
