Life Expectancy Gap Between Men and Women in the US Widened Significantly During the Covid-19 Pandemic; American Women are Living Nearly 6 Years Longer Than Men, New Study Finds. BUT WHY? – and other C-Virus related stories

Life expectancy gap between men and women in the US widened significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic:

Women in the United States can expect to live nearly six years longer than men, as disparities in deaths from Covid-19 and drug overdoses drive the life expectancy gap to the widest it’s been in decades.

Overall, life expectancy in the US fell more than two and a half years since the start of the pandemic — down to 76.1 years in 2021, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Life expectancies for both men and women were affected, but not equally.

The lifespan for women has been consistently longer than men, with the lowest difference of 4.8 years in 2010. But the gap grew by 0.2 years in the decade that followed and by 0.7 years in the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2021, life expectancy for women was 79.3 years, compared with 73.5 years for men — a gap of 5.8 years, the largest difference since 1996.

Differences in cardiovascular and lung cancer death rates. largely related to patterns in smoking behavior, have been key reasons why women have outlived men in the US over the past century.

But men have had significantly higher mortality rates from many other leading causes of death in recent years, according to a new study, and multiple converging factors are driving a wider gap.

Between 2010 and 2019, the largest drivers of the growing life expectancy gap were higher mortality rates among men for unintentional injuries, diabetes, suicide, homicide and heart disease. Some of that gap was offset by more similar mortality rates from cancer and Alzheimer’s disease among men and women. —>READ MORE HERE

American women are living nearly 6 years longer than men, new study finds. But why?

The life expectancy gap between women and men in the United States expanded to 5.8 years between 2010 and 2021, the biggest difference in longevity between the sexes in decades, according to a new report.

Researchers found that American women can expect to live around six years longer than men, citing disparities from COVID-19 and drug overdose deaths as some of the reasons driving the biggest gap since 1996.

The study, published Monday in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal, examined how COVID-19 and other underlying causes of death widened the gap from 2010 to 2021.

While distinct cardiovascular and lung cancer death rates have long been prime explanations for why women outlive men in the U.S., researchers said other leading causes of death are responsible and that multiple factors are widening the gap.

COVID-19 became the largest drivers for life expectancy gap

For U.S. men between 2010 and 2019, higher mortality rates for diabetes, heart disease, unintentional injuries, homicide and suicide were the main drivers for the life expectancy gap. Part of the gap was minimized by similar mortality rates between men and women from cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

But differences in mortality rates from COVID-19 became the leading reason the gap widened between men and women during the pandemic, which began in 2020.

In 2021, COVID-19 killed 131 per 100,000 U.S. men but only 82 per 100,000 U.S. women, the study said.

Researchers used a binary classification of gender and did not analyze overlap between other demographic subgroups and disease classifications. —>READ MORE HERE

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