By Jake Currie – Nautilus –
In the years since 2010, life expectancy in the United States has stagnated. From 2010 to 2019, longevity in our country has improved by only a few months compared to average gains of 1.78 years per decade in the half century preceding. It’s tempting to believe that through medical advances, better treatments, and expanded healthcare access, we’ve just reached the natural biological limits of life expectancy, but looking at the big picture tells a different story. While it’s true that other high-income countries have also seen slowdowns, the U.S. is lagging even further behind—and the gap is widening.
So what’s going on?
To answer that question an international team of public researchers examined mortality trends by birth cohort, or decade of birth, and published their analysis today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
