US Life Expectency Drops; Drug Overdoses & Suicide To Blame

By Susan Scutti, CNN (CNN) — Life expectancy in the United States declined from 2016 to 2017, yet the 10 leading causes of death remained the same, according to three government reports released Thursday. Increasing deaths due to drug overdoses and suicides explain this slight downtick in life expectancy, the US Centers for Disease Control says. Overdose deaths reached a new high in 2017, topping 70,000, while the suicide rate increased by 3.7%, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reports. Dr. Robert Redfield, CDC director, called the trend tragic and troubling. “Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the Nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” he wrote in a statement. General US death rates The estimate of how long a person born in 2017 can expect to live in the United States is 78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2016, the government statisticians say. As usual, women will continue to outlive men. In both 2016 and 2017, female life expectancy was 81.1 years, while male life expectancy dropped from 76.2 years in 2016 to 76.1 in 2017. The number of resident deaths recorded in the nation totaled more than 2.8 million in 2017, about 69,000 more than in 2016, the report shows. Naturally, this increase affects the overall death rate, which is annually adjusted to account for the changing age of the g...
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