A new study indicates that, on average, American men are dying about six years before their female counterparts.
According to Axios, the report was published on Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The study shows that the overall life expectancy gap between the two genders increased further in 2021, building off a trend that has been ongoing since 2011.
Women have consistently outlived men for the last 100 years, but the life expectancy gap hit a record low in 2010, at just 4.8 years between men and women. Since then, the gap has been steadily increasing in women’s favor. Concurrent with this trend, there has been a decrease in the overall life expectancy in the U.S., which has fallen for the last two consecutive years. In 2020, the average age was 77 years; in 2021, it fell to 76.1 years.
The 6-year gap recorded in 2021 is the largest such gap between men and women since 1996. Researchers who worked on the report pointed to the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic as the largest factor in the gap’s increase, with men being the more frequent victims of the disease than women.
The second largest cause in the gap’s increase, the report says, was vehicular accidents and drug overdoses, which killed 106,000 people in America in 2021. Additional contributing factors include homicides, heart diseases, and suicide. Men are overwhelmingly the victims of such causes of death as homicides and drug overdoses compared to women, and are significantly more likely to face societal hardships such as homelessness, with 90% of the homeless population being male.
“We have brought insights to a worrisome trend,” said Brandon Yan, a resident physician at the University of California San Francisco, and one of the co-authors of the study. “Future research ought to help focus public health interventions towards helping reverse this decline in life expectancy.”