The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday reported that life expectancy in the U.S had been improving but also highlighted that southern states have low rates compared to others.
The center used measured the health life expectancy (HLE) of the population in order to produce the ranking. HLE is a measurement derived by combining the mortality and morbidity data to project the possible number of years a person can live in good health based on a specific age. The HLE had been used by different countries to determine the future health requirements, assessing health programs, and discovering trends and variations.
The CDC used the data from year 2007 to 2009 from National Vital Statistics Systems (NVSS), U.S. Census Bureau, and Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to compute for the HLE each state based on the age, race, and sex. The researchers used age 65 as the age.
They found out that the whites have higher life expectancy than the blacks in all states except for Mexico and Nevada.
After identifying the HLE, the researchers moved to measure life expectancy (LE) from the average HLE—the remaining years a person can live after his retirement age or age 65. The team analyzed the mortality data from Census and NVSS.
After considering all measurements, the research team concluded that that the HLE for the Southerners are shorter than the rest of the country. Missisipi had the worst at 10.1 years while Hawaii had 15 years left. Females in Mississippi can live for 11.4 years while the Hawaiians have 17.3 more. Women also live longer on all states with an average of 0.7 year in Louisiana and 3.1 years in both North and South Dakota.
Based on the race, the researchers reported that the whites live shorter than the blacks in the southern states alone. The whites live as low as 11 years more in West Virginia up to 18.8 years in D.C. There were no data for the blacks because the total death counts for those states sum up to less than 700.
Read the full CDC report here.
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