'Deaths of despair': Opioid overdoses, alcohol abuse and suicide driving lower life expectancy in US.
Life expectancy, often considered to be a barometer for a nation's overall health, has dropped for the third year in a row in the United States, and it's primarily because of an increase in drug overdose deaths, alcohol abuse and suicide, a new study has found.
"Life expectancy has been increasing in industrialized countries for a century. But it's been a while now that the U.S. has been falling behind other countries," said Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University and one of the study's authors."Meanwhile, in the other wealthy countries, it continues to increase.
"That cluster of three conditions are sometimes referred to as 'deaths of despair,'" Woolf told ABC News' Brad Mielke in an interview for the"Start Here" podcast. Even though U.S. life expectancy peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years, it dropped to 78.6 years by 2017, according to the study, which used data from the U.S. Mortality Database and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER database.
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