A new study suggests that the life expectancy for some American women seems to be on the decline, specifically in rural areas in the south and the west.
The study, based on mortality rates in U.S. counties from 1992-1996 and 2002-2006, found that women age 75 and younger are dying at higher rates than previous years in nearly half of the nation's counties - many of them rural and in the South and West. For men however, life expectancy has held steady or improved in nearly all counties.
"We decided to look at the change in health outcomes over time, and were actually shocked to see that female mortality rates were worsening in more than 42 percent of counties," study researcher David Kindig, professor emeritus of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin, said in a statement.
Furthermore, U.S. female mortality rates increased in 1,224 counties compared to an increase in 108 counties for men.
The reason for the decline is not entirely clear. Kindig's team found that mortality rates were not affected by access to primary care physicians. But there were links between higher female mortality and certain regional, behavioral and socioeconomic factors, such as living in the rural South or the West, higher smoking rates and lower education rates.
The results were published Monday in the journal Health Affairs.
Going behind the scary headlines reveals that the answer lies in shifting behavioral and socioeconomic factors. Such criteria as smoking, obesity, exercise and the like vary with geography, and that s what these statistics reveal. Those factors definitely play an important role in life expectancy, says ACSH s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan.
