Although overall life expectancy in the U.S. has increased more than seven years for men and more than six years for women between 1960 and 2000, Washington Post staff writer David Brown and Majid Ezzati, researcher at the Harvard Global Health, have showed based on a research study that the situation is different as concerns poor counties.

The sources of mortality data the researchers used in order to estimate sex-specific life expectancy for US counties for every year between 1961 and 1983 are the National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau, as the lead researchers themselves have said in their research article posted on the PLoS Medicine site.

The studies resulted in the observation that average life expectancy in the U.S. increased from 66.9 to 74.1 years for men and from 73.5 to 79.6 to women. However, analyzing the rates in individual counties, it has been noticed that there are big dissonances between economically depressed and affluent counties, as it follows: in best-off counties men lived 9 years longer than those in worst-off counties in 1983, while for women there is a 6.7 years difference.

In 1999, the difference is even more remarkable, consisting in 11 years for men and 7.5 years for women.

A brief conclusion is that, beginning with the 1980s, the life span has declined or stagnated, namely by a rate of 4% for American men and 19% for American women. The counties in which the worst downward swings in life expectancy have been recorded are Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas.

Life expectancy is generally associated with the quality of healthcare systems. When the life-span rate attains a low rate, this is usually considered a consequence of a failure in the health care and social systems, notes MedHeadlines.

It is considered that the main causes of the decrease in this mortality indicator are diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cancer and cardiovascular disease which are long-term consequences of smoking, obesity and high blood pressure.

Taking into consideration the consistent trend of declining mortality in developed countries, the notice that large segments of the American population are experiencing worsening health conditions is now to become a public health concern.