RapAdmin
#106
I had not seen this before… but ran into it on Twitter/x. I wonder if its additive… I may go back to college for another degree… (and it would be fun to do anyway).
Source: Accounting for the widening mortality gap between American adults with and without a BA | Brookings
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I would assume the difference was due to how the two groups reacted during the pandemic.
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KarlT
#108
Or just a reflection of their underlying health, and thus the impact of Covid, and Covid shutdown caused excess deaths.
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Not in 1995-2019 
. It’s also notable that both groups were gaining up until 2010 or so, after which the college grads continued to gain while the non-grads plateaued or fell.
There have been dramatic changes in patterns of mortality since 1992, but gaps rose consistently in each of thirteen broad classifications of cause of death. We document rising gaps in other wellbeing-relevant measures, background factors to the rising gap in mortality, including morbidity, social isolation, marriage, family income, and wealth …
The largest contribution comes from deaths of despair [suicide, alcohol, or drug
overdose], which added 49 deaths [per 100,000 population to the death rate gap between BA and non-BA] … followed by cancer, 43, cardiovascular disease, 35, and chronic lower respiratory diseases, 22. The contributions of diabetes, transport accidents, Alzheimer, nephritis, septicemia, and assault are smaller at 10, 7, 7, 6, 4, and 0 … [COVID added an extra 107 [!] from 2019-2021]
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/1_Case-Deaton_unembargoed.pdf
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A summary and review of the book.
and, another:
But “Coming Apart,” which depicts members of white elites as hypocrites living in a bubble and the white working class as succumbing to moral decay, is hardly a flattering portrait of white people, let alone, Mr. Murray insists, a partisan barnburner.
“It’s not a brief for the right,” Mr. Murray said in a recent interview at the American Enterprise Institute here, where he has been a scholar since 1990. “The problem I describe isn’t a conservative-versus-liberal problem. It’s a cultural problem the whole country has.”
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NYT on Murray is utter and complete garbage.
The rich everywhere in the world tend to act the same way. Same as the poor. The uneducated tend to be poor and would probably make poor(er) decisions when compared to the well-educated.
The best solution is a proper education and free healthcare for all. But that requires money and time.
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KarlT
#116
At a time when we are running out of both time and money.
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The USA always has more time and money. If they need more dollars, they can simply print them. Politicians simply don’t care enough to devote the time and money to either of these endeavors the same way other countries do.
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A new paper, and if its true in monkeys, its probably true in humans…
Early life adversity has sex-dependent effects on survival across the lifespan in rhesus macaques
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Good genes plus what? Certainly not diet and exercise.
Warren Buffet is 93.
Warren Buffett eats McDonald’s for breakfast, drinks 5 Cokes a day, and devours cookies and ice cream.
"Warren Buffett continues eating colas, burgers and fries. In fact, during a 2016 interview (with the Fortune magazine), he said that he a “one-quarter” Coca-Cola. “If I eat 2700 calories a day, a quarter of that is Coca-Cola.”
Charlie Munger, Buffet’s long time friend is 99 and still active “He is also chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation, based in Los Angeles, California, and a director of Costco Wholesale Corporation”
Charlie jokingly says the secret of long life is See’s Peanut Brittle.
“Charlie Munger loves peanut brittle, has diet coke, and has never exercised after he left the army. He is 99.”
Back in the 1950’s Gerovital H3 was a common “youth drug” among celebrities. It was too expensive for the average worker. The Gabor Sisters among others took it. The Gabor sisters looked good well into old age so maybe there was something to it.
The point is; that among rich dudes, who knows what medical interventions they may be taking on the side?
Maybe they each have a harem of Vestal Virgins for blood transfusions (The Vestal Virgins were a group of six women who served as priestesses of the goddess Vesta in ancient Rome. They were chosen for their age, patrician family lineage, and apparent good health.) 
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AnUser
#120
Buffett at 70, my cholesterol level is “a little high”, his mother lived to 92. Polyp in colon removed after random physical.
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Warren does have prostate cancer.
He’s a private man, so we really don’t know if he spends millions on healthcare on the sly. He’s a multi-billionaire after all.
Who knows? He may be lurking on this forum and trying the DAV protocol.
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DYING EARLY AMERICA’S LIFE EXPECTANCY CRISIS
STRESS IS WEATHERING OUR BODIES FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Oct. 17 at 6:00 a.m.
Physicians and public health experts have pointed to one culprit time and again when asked why Americans live shorter lives than peers in nations with similar resources, especially people felled by chronic diseases in the prime of life: stress.
A cardiologist, endocrinologist, obesity specialist, health economist and social epidemiologists all said versions of the same thing: Striving to get ahead in an unequal society contributes to people in the United States aging quicker, becoming sicker and dying younger.
Recent polls show adults are stressed by factors beyond their control, including inflation, violence, politics and race relations. A spring Washington Post-Ipsos poll found 50 percent of Americans said not having enough income was a source of financial stress; 55 percent said not having enough savings was also a source of stress.
“We should take a step back and look at the society we’re living in and how that is actually determining our stress levels, our fatigue levels, our despair levels,” said Elizabeth H. Bradley, president of Vassar College and co-author of the book “The American Health Care Paradox.” “That’s for everybody. Health is influenced very much by these factors, so that’s why we were talking about a reconceptualization of health.”
The Washington Post’s efforts to gain a deeper understanding of how stress can cause illness, disability and shorter lives led to a once derided body of research that has become part of the mainstream discussion about improving America’s health: the Weathering Hypothesis.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2023/stress-chronic-illness-aging/
full article https://archive.ph/ya4qR#selection-141.0-149.51
related
The weathering hypothesis as an explanation for racial disparities in health: a systematic review
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The Post spent the past year examining U.S. life expectancy. Here’s what we found.
Not so long ago, the United States was on a trajectory to reach an average life expectancy of 80. Then, progress toward that milestone stalled before lurching into reverse. That was happening even before the coronavirus pandemic, a health cataclysm that accelerated the backward march of Americans’ life spans.
It is a distinctly American story told in lives hobbled by chronic illness, in lives lost too soon.
The Washington Post spent the past year examining the nation’s crisis of premature death, analyzing county-level death records from the past five decades. The analysis concentrated on people in the prime of life — 35 to 64 years — because the scale of loss is so profound: These ages have the greatest number of excess deaths compared with peer nations.
To tell the story, The Post spoke with scores of clinicians, patients and researchers, and reported from 10 states, Europe and South America. Customized data analyses were performed by a health-care analytics company and by a federal health agency. Health statistics from peer nations were used to inform conclusions about the comparative state of Americans’ well-being.
The portrait that emerged shows a nation beset with chronic illness and saddled with a fractured health-care system that, compared with its peers, costs more, delivers less and fails at the fundamental mission of helping people maintain their health:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/10/02/takeaways-us-life-expectancy-crisis/
full article https://archive.ph/W6ZIZ
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@RapAdmin Thanks for the articles. It appears that we are in the vanguard of preventative medicine. It makes me feel so hopeless to read about these sad cases where poor health decisions have led to early death. Smoking. Obesity. Processed Foods. (McDonalds?)
While it may be impossible for us to change society, we can change the lives of those we love. Let’s help our friends and family to live long and healthy lives. Unfortunately, though, there’s not much we can do if our advice goes unheeded. Luckily, there will be some that listen and will live.
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Dying Early AMERICA’S LIFE EXPECTANCY CRISIS
A tale of two sisters, two countries and their health systems
Gawande and other experts contrast high-cost with high-value care. The United States spends 18.3 percent of its gross domestic product — and more per person than any other country — on its state-of-the-art, sickness-focused system. Yet it is experiencing a decline in life expectancy to 76.4 years in 2021, the shortest in almost two decades. Portugal, by contrast, spends about one-fifth as much per person, yet life expectancy here has advanced to 82, six months longer than the European average.
A key factor is that Portugal spends its health-care funds on an integrated approach to primary care, including clinics for most essential needs and, crucially, community outreach to identify vulnerable people before they become gravely ill.
Full article: https://archive.ph/3hhjw#selection-589.0-617.241
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