The U.S. has gotten better at saving people with heart disease, cancer, and strokes, but early drug overdose, Alzheimer's, and suicide deaths are increasing.
The drug overdose problem has become so severe in the United States, it's now bringing down the country's average life expectancy, according to a new analysis.
For more than two decades, Americans' life expectancy had only gone up every year. But while analyzing the data for 2015, scientist Deborah Dowell and her team saw a drop. "It really got our attention," says Dowell, the senior medical advisor for the Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Upon deeper digging, the researchers found the culprit: drug overdoses, most them overdoses on opioids such as prescription painkillers, heroin, and fentanyl. The last time the U.S. saw a drop in life expectancy was in 1993, at the height of HIV/AIDS's spread and deadliness. They published their results today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
[For more on this story by Francie Diep, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...trys-life-expectancy]
Photo: A firefighter treats a women suspected of overdosing on heroin on July 14th, 2017, in Rockford, Illinois. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
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