“Why do women live longer than men” is a common caption on social media for videos showing all sorts of stupid stunts. But the real answer to the large and widening gap in life expectancy is even more stark, researchers say.According to a study published in the journal JAMA Internal MedicineCOVID-19 and drug overdoses were the main factors that widened the gap in life expectancy between men and women to almost six years in 2021, the largest gap since 1996. UPI I will report it. Lead author Dr. Brandon Yang said the gap narrowed to 4.8 years in 2010, but has continued to widen since then. According to the study, the average life expectancy for women in 2021 was 79.3 years and 73.5 years for men.
“It was unsettling to see that,” said Yang, a medical resident at the University of California, San Francisco. new york times. Researchers say men are twice as likely to die from an opioid overdose as women. They are also more likely to die from murder or suicide. Almost 40% of that difference was due to men being more likely to die from the coronavirus. Biological differences such as immune responses play a role; times However, men are more likely to work in high-risk industries such as construction, while women have higher vaccination rates.
Elizabeth Wrigley Field, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota, said: scientific american This means that when people die young, it has an exaggerated effect on life expectancy. She points out that most opioid overdose victims have decades to live. “We need to understand which groups are particularly shortened in life expectancy and focus our interventions, at least in part, on these groups,” Yang said. She said the gap in life expectancy between men and women widened during the 20th century because men were more likely to smoke. Before 2010, it had been shrinking as smoking rates declined. (In 2021, life expectancy across the U.S. decreased for the second year in a row.)