Mortality Divergences in Cardiovascular Mortality in the Second Half of Life Between US and Other High-Income Countries: In Which Ages do Differences Manifest?

Octavio Bramajo , University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
Neil Mehta, University of Texas Medical Branch

Compared to other high-income countries, the United States underperforms in terms of life expectancy. One key driver of this differential is cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, a cause on which the US has had worse trends since around 2008. The differential in CVD mortality has been previously described, however, it’s contribution to the widening US life expectancy lag relative to other high-income countries is unknown. In this paper, we measured the contribution of CVD mortality to the post-2010 life expectancy divergence between the US and other countries. Using life table methods in WHO mortality data by cause, we computed life expectancy at age 50 (LE50) and the age in a lifetable at which the first 10% of the population died (p10) considering a counterfactual scenario through cause-deleted life-tables, removing CVD deaths. Results suggest the US has a lowest all-cause e50 and p10 age compared to other high-income countries, and the gap with other countries increased during 2008 and 2019. However, by removing CVD deaths, the magnitude of such gap would have been narrower, indicating the meaningful role of CVD when considering mortality differences between the US and other high-income countries in the last decade. In the full version of this paper we will try to establish the contribution of the first ten percent of deaths that occur after age 50 in life expectancy differences across countries

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 Presented in Session P2. Health, Mortality, Ageing - Aperitivo