2016

These Maps Show How Americans Are Dying Younger. It’s Not Just the Opioid Epidemic.

"Every once in a while, you get these spikes and mortality jumps up — but there’s usually something you can point to to explain why it happened," said one of the authors of that commentary, Dartmouth health economist Jonathan Skinner. "You can point to the fact that millions of Russian men lost their secure jobs in the Soviet Union."

The same isn’t true for the mortality trends in the US today, he added. "The attribution here is just much more difficult because we think we have some idea — we are pointing to opioids — but we don’t really know yet."

Dying Younger: U.S. Life Expectancy ‘a Real Problem’

If only the good die young, Americans are unfortunately getting better.

U.S. life expectancy dipped by a little more than a month last year from 2014, to 78.8 years, according to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics. It's the first decline in more than two decades. And after years of gains, U.S. life expectancy has been essentially flat for a few years, which means an inauspicious trend could be in the works.

The decline "could be a blip, but even if it’s flat, we have a real problem," said Jonathan Skinner, a professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice.