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• Posted August 6, 2024

Marriage, Gender, Education, Race All Influence How Long You'll Live

A person’s lifespan appears to be linked to four specific social factors – marriage, gender, education and race.

The interplay between those four factors helps explain differences in lifespan between Americans, researchers report.

“There is a complex interaction between social and individual determinants of health, with no one determinant explaining the full observed variation in lifespan,” concluded the research team led by Marie Pier Bergeron-Boucher, an assistant professor with Syddansk University in Denmark.

Overall life expectancy has declined in the United States for two years in a row, by nearly two years in 2020 and by about a year in 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

Average U.S. life expectancy now stands at 76.1 years, its lowest level since 1996, according to the CDC.

For this study, researchers focused on partial life expectancy, or the years a person can expect to live between ages 30 and 80.

The team analyzed federal data on deaths and the U.S. population between 2015 and 2019, looking at how all combinations of the four factors could influence risk of early death from one of the 11 leading causes of death in the nation.

Results show there’s an 18-year difference between those with the shortest and longest partial life expectancy. 

White men with a high school diploma or less who never marry had the shortest partial life expectancy, around 37 years from age 30.

At the other end, white married women with a university degree can expect to have another 55 years from age 30, results show.

Individual characteristics tug life expectancy back and forth, researchers found. Some factors boost a person’s extra years, while others shorten them.

For example, having a high school diploma or less reduces partial life expectancy by nearly four years, according to the study, which was published Aug. 5 in the journal BMJ Open.

But being married and female increases partial life expectancy by five years -- so a married woman with a high school diploma can be expected to have a better-than-average life expectancy.

In another example, a university degree increases partial life expectancy by nearly four years, but being never married and male decreases it by nearly five years. Thus, a well-educated single man can expect a lower-than-average life expectancy, researchers said.

Marriage and higher education always lower a person’s risk of early death, researchers found.

And women generally have a survival advantage over men for all causes of death, save for some cancers and Alzheimer’s disease.

However, race has a more complex role in life expectancy.

Some specific causes of death affect more white people, like suicide, injuries, chronic lung disease and lung cancer. Others, like liver disease, affect more Hispanic people, while most causes of death affect Black people more across the board.

“Having one characteristic that is associated with higher mortality is often not a sufficient criterion to be considered at high risk of mortality, but the risk does increase with the number of such characteristics,” the team concluded in a journal news release. “In addition, not all analyzed social determinants of health have the same degree of influence on lifespan and mortality.”

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on U.S. life expectancy.

SOURCE: BMJ, news release Aug. 5, 2024