Men in the U.S. are dying nearly six years before women

Men in the U.S. are dying nearly six years before women, per Axios.

For over a century, it has been recognized that women tend to live longer than men. However, recent research conducted by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and UC San Francisco reveals that, in the United States, this life expectancy gap has been widening for over a decade. The COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid overdose epidemic are identified as key drivers of this trend.

Published online on November 13 in JAMA Internal Medicine, the research paper indicates that the disparity in life expectancy between American men and women grew to 5.8 years in 2021, the largest gap since 1996. This represents an increase from 4.8 years in 2010, which marked the smallest gap in recent history.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affected men, was the primary factor contributing to the widening gap between 2019 and 2021. Other significant contributors included unintentional injuries and poisonings (mainly drug overdoses), accidents, and suicide.

The decline in life expectancy in the U.S., dropping to 76.1 years in 2021 from 78.8 years in 2019 and 77 years in 2020, has been linked in part to "deaths of despair," referring to the rise in deaths from causes like suicide, drug use disorders, and alcoholic liver disease, often associated with economic hardship, depression, and stress.

While the rates of death from drug overdose and homicide have increased for both men and women, men constitute a disproportionately higher share of these deaths, the research found.

The study, led by Brandon Yan, a UCSF internal medicine resident physician and research collaborator at Harvard Chan School, used data from the National Center for Health Statistics to identify the leading causes of death impacting life expectancy. The authors underscore the need for further analysis to determine if these trends change after 2021 and emphasize the importance of targeted public health interventions to address the widening disparity in life expectancy, particularly for men.