Opioid Overdose Deaths Impacts Americans’ Life Expectancy

(Winter 2017) According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, life expectancy increased from 2000 – 2015, primarily due to fewer people dying from heart disease, cancer and infectious diseases. As such, people born in 2015 are expected to live 78 years, as compared to 76 years for those born in 2010. That’s good news.

But the bad news? The increase would have been even higher had we not seen an increase in the number of deaths attributable to conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, chronic liver disease (primarily caused by alcoholism), unintentional injuries, and drug overdoses. For the first time since 1993, life expectancy decreased the last year of the reporting period (2014 – 2015).  And alarmingly, the decrease in life expectancy due to drug overdoses alone was about the same as the impact of Alzheimer’s, liver disease and car accidents combined.

According to a related article published in TIME magazine, “the last time a single contributor had such an effect in dropping life expectancy was during the HIV-AIDS epidemic, during its peak in the early 1990s.”

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