Not Stayin ' Alive

This is not new news, but it ' s strong confirmation of earlier observations that have been somewhat controversial, and also bad news that the trend is continuing.That trend is declining life expectancy in the U.S. I ' m not linking to the full report in JAMA because it ' s incredibly wonky and behind a paywall anyway, but rather to the associated editorial, which tells you what you need to know.Before we get into the substance of this, let me explain the concept of life expectancy. I ' ll try to put this simply, but some people find it confusing. It ' s really a fictitious, though useful, construct. It isn ' t really a prediction of the future, but it tells us something about the present. Below is a portion of what ' s called a " life table. " It shows the proportion of people in the U.S. who died in each 1-year age cohort in 2015.As you can see, .006383, or a little more than 6/1,000 male babies died before their first birthday. (A simplifying assumption is that all deaths occur on June 30. Don ' t worry about it.) Of the remaining male babies, .000453, which only 4/5 out of 10,000, died before their second birthday. So it ' s somewhat dangerous to be an infant but once you get past that you ' re in pretty good shape until you get old. It isn ' t until age 81 that the probability of death for men goes up to the same level as the infant mortality rate.So life expectancy at birth is the average (mean) age you would live if you were born in 2015 and experience the same probabi...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs