As we enter the new year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides Americans with some optimistic statistics: We re living longer by about a month, to be more precise. According to the new report, the average life expectancy in 2009 was 78.6 years, compared to 78.7 years in 2010. During the same time period, U.S. death rates also dropped by about half a percent, with a 3.9 percent decline in infant mortality and a 13.3 percent drop for HIV/AIDS.
Heart disease and cancer still remain the leading causes of death, though death rates did in fact decrease by 2.4 percent and 0.6 percent in these categories, respectively. The decline in cardiovascular death rate has been, to some extent, attributed to use of statins to lower cholesterol, although better detection and treatment of high blood pressure also contributed. Dr. Jay Brooks, chairman of hematology and oncology at Ochsner Health System in Baton Rouge, cites declines in smoking rates as another factor in the decline in heart disease and cancer mortality. But as ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross aptly points out, while there has indeed been a gratifying decrease in the rate of teenagers who take up smoking, there actually hasn t been a significant decline in U.S. adult smoking rates for the past few years now. It s been hovering around 20 percent for a while, he says, so I wouldn t attribute death rate decreases to adults quitting smoking. However, if we were to use more effective smoking cessation methods, maybe we would indeed see a greater decrease in those figures.
And while there was much good news to be had from the CDC report, death rates did increase for some diseases most notably Alzheimer s, which went up by 3.3 percent. In fact, the prevalence of diseases expected in our aging population in general seem to be on the rise, though at least death rates for pneumonia and influenza (which tend to most severely affect the elderly) have dropped, thanks in part to our nation s emphasis on immunization.
If the objective health parameters in our country are mostly improving, says Dr. Ross, then why are we still bombarded with stories about toxic chemicals and cancer risks by the news media? Seems like the new CDC statistics should balance out some of these chemophobia scares.