U.S. life expectancy jumped last year, and early data suggests there may be another — much smaller — improvement this year.
Deaths from nearly all leading causes declined last year, especially from COVID-19, heart disease and drug overdoses, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Thursday. This added nearly a year to the expected life span of Americans.
Experts say this is part of the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. But life expectancy has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, and life expectancy appears to be losing momentum.
“What you’re seeing is continued improvement, but slow improvement,” said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a University of Minnesota researcher who studies death trends. “We are returning to a kind of normalcy that is worse than before the pandemic.”
Last year, about 3.1 million U.S. residents died, about 189,000 fewer than the previous year. Death rates declined across all racial and ethnic groups and in both men and women.
Provisional data for the first 10 months of 2024 shows the country is on track to see even fewer deaths this year, perhaps about 13,000 fewer. But the CDC’s Robert Anderson said the gap is likely to narrow as more death certificates come in.
That means life expectancy is likely to increase in 2024 — “but probably not by much,” said Anderson, who oversees death tracking at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Life expectancy is an estimate of how many years a child born in a given year can expect to live, given the mortality rate at that time. It is a basic measure of population health.
For decades, due to medical advances and public health measures, American life expectancy has increased at least slightly every year. It peaked in 2014, at nearly 79, and then remained relatively stable for several years. Then it fell during the COVID-19 pandemic, and dropped in 2021 to just under 76 1/2.
That increased to 77 1/2 years in 2022 and, according to the new report, to about 78 1/2 years last year.
Life expectancy for American women remains well above that of men – slightly more than 81 for women, compared to slightly less than 76 for men.
Over the past five years, more than 1.2 million U.S. deaths have been attributed to COVID-19. But most of them occurred in 2020 and 2021, before vaccination and infection-induced immunity became widespread.
At one time Corona virus was the third leading cause of death in the country. Last year it was the underlying cause of nearly 50,000 deaths, making it the country’s No. 10 killer.
Data for 2024 is still coming in, but there have been about 30,000 coronavirus deaths so far. Anderson said that at that rate, suicide could overtake COVID-19 this year.
Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the country. Some less appreciated good news is that the death rate from heart disease is projected to decline by about 3% in 2023. That’s a much smaller drop than the 73% drop in COVID-19 death rates, but heart disease affects more people so even small changes can be more impactful, Anderson said.
There’s also good news about deaths caused by excessive drinking, which fell by 105,000 among U.S. residents in 2023, according to a second report released Thursday by the CDC.
Experts say the reasons for the decline in overdoses are still being studied, but there is hope that such deaths will decline further in the future. Some pointed to survey results this week that showed drug use among teens is not increasing.
Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “The sooner you start taking a drug, the greater the risk that you will continue using it and the greater the risk that you will become addicted to it – and that will have unpleasant consequences. ” Drug Abuse, which funded the survey study. “If you can reduce the pipeline (of new drug users) … you can prevent overdoses.”