Life expectancy fell across the majority of high-income countries, signaling a collective and simultaneous decline among affluent nations for the first time in decades, a new study finds.
Among 18 high-income countries — including Spain, Sweden, Japan, Australia, the UK and the United States — most countries saw declines in life expectancy between 2014 and 2015, according to the study, published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal.
Australia, Japan, Denmark and Norway were the only countries in the study that showed an increase in life expectancy across all years for both men and women.
The drop in the remaining 14 countries was “notable both for the number of countries and for the magnitude of the declines,” the authors wrote.
Outside the United States, declines in overall life expectancy were focused among people 65 and older, with the rise in deaths among this demographic probably attributable to an unusually severe flu season, according to the study, which was co-authored by Jessica Ho of the University of Southern California and Arun Hendi of Princeton University.
It’s a trend that highlights some potential issues around health-care provision within these countries, according to Domantas Jasilionis, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany who authored an editorial that accompanied the study.
“The fact that modern healthcare systems in the most advanced high-income countries were unable to cope with this unexpected challenge, resulting in the first reductions in longevity for decades, is striking and might signal more profound problems,” Jasilionis wrote.
The study also suggested that respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other mental and nervous system disorders contributed in part to driving down life expectancy among those 65 and older.
In countries where environmental threats such as air pollution and poor air quality have become more problematic, deaths from these diseases may become more commonplace, suggests Holly Nelson-Becker, an expert in social gerontology at Brunel University in London,who was not involved in the study.
“The issue of susceptibility to influenza and respiratory problems speaks, in my view, to increasing issues of environmental problems such as smog and other forms of pollution,” Nelson-Becker said.
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