WEDNESDAY, April 19, 2006 (HealthDay News) -- Americans are living longer than ever, and the gender gap for life expectancy is decreasing.
The good news comes out of preliminary U.S. government findings released Wednesday that also showed the year 2004 had the sharpest drop in the number of deaths in about 60 years, down almost 50,000.
"The most striking aspect of the data this year was the intensity or volume of the decreases," said Arialdi Miniño, a statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the lead author of the report. "This is the largest single-year decrease in the raw numbers of deaths that we've seen since the 1940s."
The report, Deaths: Preliminary Data for 2004, is based on analysis of about 90 percent of the death certificates from 2004. The full report will be out in May.
As the population grows, experts generally expect the actual number of deaths to go up slightly. This year's data was a surprise. "We're scratching our heads a bit," Miniño confessed.
But after finding no errors in the data, the research team now suspects that the drop is due to decreases in deaths from heart disease, stroke and cancer, the leading killers. It may also have to do with the fact that 2004 was a relatively mild flu season.
In any event, the downward blip is unlikely to become a trend, Miniño said.
According to the report, the life expectancy of Americans in 2004 was 77.9 years, the highest ever. And women lived an average of 80.4 years; men, 75.2 years. That gap of 5.2 years is the smallest difference between the sexes since 1946.
That bit of news met with applause from experts.
"This is great news that people are living longer, and we want to make sure they are living as healthy as they should," said Dr. Eileen Callahan, an assistant professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. "There's only so much the medical system can do. People have to start taking care of themselves with exercise, appropriate diet and good medical care."
"One of the striking issues is the increase in the life expectancy since really the year 1900 in the developed world," added Dr. Knight Steel, chief of geriatrics at Hackensack University Medical Center and endowed professor of geriatrics at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
"All the alternatives to aging are bad," he said. "This is really a plus."
"The time has come to begin to collect data on function and functional decline or lack of it," Steel added. "The nature of diseases has changed, with acute illnesses rapidly being replaced by chronic. Ideally, it would be nice to know not only that life expectancy has been extended, but that function and quality of life has been improved in that extended period."
The report also showed that age-adjusted death rates declined to a record low of 801 deaths per 100,000 population in 2004, down from almost 833 deaths per 100,000 the year before. Both genders as well as all racial groups showed declines in this category.
"The trends in age-adjusted death rates we expected because we've been seeing an increase in life expectancy for some years now," Miniño said.
He added that "the increase in life expectancy for the population in general and the closing of certain gaps have long been established. The gap between black and white has also been decreasing for several years, and this trend continues."
All the sex, race and Hispanic-origin groups described in this report showed significant decreases in the age-adjusted death rate between 2003 and 2004.
The preliminary, estimated number of total deaths in the United States for 2004 was 2,398,343.
Leading causes of death in 2004 were still heart disease, cancer and stroke. Overall, the 15 leading causes of death remained the same in 2004 as in 2003, but Alzheimer's disease overtook influenza/pneumonia. Alzheimer's is now the seventh leading cause, with influenza and pneumonia close behind at number eight.
"This is worrisome," Callahan said. "The disease is very common, unfortunately, and we don't have a cure for it yet and really not the best treatment, and it'll probably keep getting worse and worse as the population lives longer."
The preliminary infant mortality rate for 2004 was 6.76 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, representing a slight (1.3 percent) but not statistically significant decrease.
More information
View the report at the National Center for Health Statistics.
