A new study has found that men have a six-year shorter life expectancy when compared to women following the coronavirus pandemic.
The report notes that the life expectancy gap between men and women in the United States has expanded to 5.8 years between 2010 and 2021. This is seen as the largest difference in life longevity between the sexes in the past decade.
Life Expectancy Gap Between Men and Women
Researchers discovered that American women are expected to live around six years longer than men, citing disparities from COVID-19 and drug overdose deaths as some of the factors that drive the life expectancy gap, which is the largest since 1996.
The study was published on Monday in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal after it examined how the health crisis and other underlying causes of death widened the life expectancy gap. For a long time, distinct cardiovascular and lung cancer death rates have been the main explanations that scientists have used to justify why women have longer lifespans than men in the U.S.
But the researchers said that there were other leading causes of death that were responsible. They added that other factors are widening the margin, as per USA Today.
For men in the U.S. between 2010 and 2019, higher mortality rates were recorded for diabetes, heart disease, unintentional injuries, homicide, and suicide. These are seen as the main drivers for the life expectancy gap between them and American women.
Part of the difference was minimized by similar mortality rates between men and women from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. However, the differences in mortality rates from the coronavirus became the leading reason for the widening gap between men and women during the health crisis.
The study found that in 2021, the coronavirus pandemic caused the death of 131 per 100,000 men in the U.S. but only 82 per 100,000 women in the U.S. Researchers used a binary classification of gender and did not analyze overlap between other demographic subgroups and disease classifications.
Effects of the COVID-19 Crisis
The authors of the new study noted that the gap in life expectancy between men and women in the U.S. during the health crisis would have widened even further if it were not for a rise in maternal deaths, according to Fortune.
The finding of the study comes as life expectancy in the U.S. for both genders continues to shorten compared to previous years. The life expectancy in 2021 was 76.1 years, which was lower than compared to 2020 and 2019 when it was 77 years and 78.8 years respectively.
One of the authors of the study, Dr. Brandon Yan said that they expect to see life expectancy worsen due to the opioid epidemic. This is because life expectancy in the U.S. had previously fallen for this particular reason from 2015 to 2017.
Yan, a resident physician at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, said that overall life expectancy started to improve in 2018 and 2019. However, the coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020, which predictably caused life expectancy to lower once more, said Medical News Today.
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