Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

statnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 327 posts

Re: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

#261

Post by 8b16380d »

ajross wrote: post #148
chasd00 wrote: post #19

remember during the lockdowns when incidence of cancer diagnoses, heart disease, and other life threatening ailments fell through the floor? I guess those chickens are coming home to roost. The total isolation resulting in depression/drug use, addiction, and overdose may have had a weee bit of an affect too.

Do the numbers add up? That sounds like a prior-fitting hypothesis to me. Cancer, overdose, suicides, etc... are all well-tracked. If they were disproportionately high then surely we'd know.

Overdose is disproportionately high though[1]. I mean, take a stroll thru most American cities and you can see what a toll drug use has done to many many people.

Outside of the cities, the opioid crisis has claimed the lives of millions. I have had friends and family die from overdose and complications from over-prescription.

It’s no secret; addressing the problem would cost drug manufacturers billions, which is why nothing is being done IMO

[1]: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/overdose-deaths-s...

Re: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

#262

Post by fasteo »

stouset wrote: post #84
eric4smith wrote: post #3

Obesity. Covid literally attacks obese people. And obese people also are at huge risk. I'm overweight and I was literally frightened during covid. Now I lift weights every day and work on my diet very hard. But we are literally ignoring the elephant (literally) in the room.

Anecdata of n = 1 but two weeks ago I was hospitalized due to a stroke (IA). I'm 38 years old, exercise vigorously for 10-12 hours per week, am a healthy weight for my height, have good blood pressure and cholesterol, and have zero known risk factors other than a COVID infection a bit under a year ago. I'm not ready to blame COVID just yet (we're still searching for an underlying cause) but my doctors and nurses all…

Honest question without "shady" purpose or intention.

Are you vaccinated ? If so, before or after your COVID infection ?

Thanks

Re: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

#263

Post by maxerickson »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #107
californical wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, we can start to treat city planning as a healthcare issue. Limit zoning restrictions that currently make driving everywhere the most convenient choice, stop all freeway expansion projects, and make as many walkable, bikeable, friendly neighborhoods as possible. If people want/need to go outside and walk or bike to accomplish their daily chores, they won’t need to think about exercise as much because it’ll ju…

People will literally rezone entire cities rather than saying we need to eat less food and workout more.

This dismissal would be more compelling if it was actually clear that most cities are zoned well.

Re: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

#264

Post by npteljes »

remarkEon wrote: post #22
eric4smith wrote: post #3

Obesity. Covid literally attacks obese people. And obese people also are at huge risk. I'm overweight and I was literally frightened during covid. Now I lift weights every day and work on my diet very hard. But we are literally ignoring the elephant (literally) in the room.

Hear, hear. One of the greatest failings of our "modern" healthcare system is that there's no plan to address this crisis. Obesity is the gateway to what seems like an infinite amount of health complications - not to mention the additional burden on the health care system itself when they get sick. I fully acknowledge that it's a difficult subject, it upsets people, and it's uncomfortable. The greatest healthcare adv…

>One of the greatest failings of our "modern" healthcare system

I'd rather put the "failings" in quotes, instead of the modern. Contrary to it failing, it seems to be working rather excellently as business.

Re: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

#265

Post by xtracto »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #257
stouset wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of your opinion, the one bit of information provided by answering this question has little value other than to spark a pointless argument.

Not really and this is the problem. My quality of life decreased after my booster shot. Had severe reaction and my athletic performance dropped quite a bit afterwards never going back to the baseline pre-vaccine. Also having more heart palpitations and a decrease on VO2max. But apparently when I talk about this, I am either labelled anti-vaxx (even though I got the damn vaccine), a conspiracy crazy or people try to j…

Another point of anecdata here: After my AZ booster (2 first vaccines were pfizer) I got a micro stroke (Lacunar Tia). My QoL also decreased after that. Too bad it's currently a taboo to talk about these sort of things.

Re: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

#266

Post by acdha »

strken wrote: post #198
acdha wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s lifestyle: Americans lead the world in both obesity and car centric lifestyles, and we have a ton of reinforcing factors – suburbs designed around cars are unpleasant/unsafe to be active in, people eat unhealthy food because it’s cheap (cars and suburbs are both more expensive) and something they can eat in the car or pickup on the way home, kids are prevented from exercising because there are few safe places in…

What proof do you have that it's lifestyle? My opinion is loosely based on http://achemicalhunger.com/ , specifically the papers that found wild animals are getting fat, and the timing. The things you say are all true, but they were also true to a lesser extent in the 60s, when Americans were much less obese than they are now. They're also not true for wild animals.

> The things you say are all true, but they were also true to a lesser extent in the 60s, when Americans were much less obese than they are now.

You're talking about movements over time — it's not like everyone moved out to the suburbs in 1955, and in the 1960s you still had a lot of people living in more urban walkable environments (the riots in the 60s and crime in the 70s really ramped up suburban flight). American leaders were already talking about an obesity crisis by the 1960s (the flawed dietary guidelines in the 1970s were a “we don't have time to wait!” response to decades of that trend) but it just kept getting worse over time, which seems to track with an increasingly car-dominant lifecycle.

That site doesn't have a good reputation and I would especially be careful about drawing conclusions from a single study of one type of animal. There's an especially big confound that many “wild” animals have still had significant habitat disruption from humans and it's not clear whether those macaques have access to human food, crops, etc. which would not otherwise have been the case.

Re: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

#267

Post by ZeroGravitas »

vandreas2 wrote: post #238
anchochilis wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, people have been saying we need to eat less food and work out more for decades. The "just educate people and they'll make better choices" approach has not worked.

Has worked for me. I find the UK food labels on most products quite informative as a rule of thumb. I remember initially being very surprised at some food contains when I started paying attention and how very small things like Mars bars can have so many calories comparatively of course. I think there's something sinister about not wanting the consumer to know what your product contains.

Libertarians are fighting for 'food freedom' and escape from these authoritarian rules forcing sellers to inform consumers:

https://reason.com/2022/06/18/mandatory-menu-labeling-still-...

Re: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

#268

Post by strikelaserclaw »

diogenescynic wrote: post #10

I make a decent salary and so does my wife. We have two kids and we still don’t own a home. People I know who don’t work in tech are really struggling. There are multiple US cities without clean drinking water. It seems like the US is mostly in constant decline with a few elite city/states able to avoid the consequences. As a result, people eat junk food, go to the doctor less, have more stress, drive everywhere, no…

direct consequence of a political system that can be bought and sold by money.

Re: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

#269

Post by credit_guy »

This is an artifact of the statistical model used to estimate the life expectancy. The model is called Lee-Carter [1], and it's basically a linear regression.

The last 2 years were outliers in terms experienced mortality. Most likely mortality will not stay elevated in the years to come. But the model does not know this. It simply uses these years to estimate how the mortality will evolve.

Now, one can say that some people will experience long covid, so their mortality rate will stay elevated for years to come. Fair, but that does not apply to people of age 0 (newborns), which is what this life expectancy number that's being reported is. For those people, the life expectancy will not be lower than before Covid, if anything it will be slightly higher (corresponding to 2 years of progress).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee%E2%80%93Carter_model

Re: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

#270

Post by anchochilis »

vandreas2 wrote: post #238
anchochilis wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, people have been saying we need to eat less food and work out more for decades. The "just educate people and they'll make better choices" approach has not worked.

Has worked for me. I find the UK food labels on most products quite informative as a rule of thumb. I remember initially being very surprised at some food contains when I started paying attention and how very small things like Mars bars can have so many calories comparatively of course. I think there's something sinister about not wanting the consumer to know what your product contains.

This thread is full of people commenting along the lines of "I have been able to manage my weight successfully, so other people must be fat because they're lazy idiots."

HN is full of people who will accept nuance and complexity in technical discussions. Why not in this area as well, where individual biology, cultural expectations, economic incentives, and environmental factors intersect with personal choice?

Post reply on HN