Cardiac Disease Plummets, Study Says

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The New York Sun

ATLANTA – American life expectancy has hit another all-time high – 77.6 years – and deaths from heart disease, cancer, and stroke are dropping, the government reported yesterday.


Still, the march of medical progress has taken a worrisome turn: Half of Americans in the 55-to-64 age group – including the oldest of the baby boomers – have high blood pressure, and two in five are obese. That means they are in worse shape in some respects than Americans born a decade earlier were when they were that age.


The health of this large group of the near-elderly is of major concern to American taxpayers, because they are now becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security.


“What happens to this group is very important because it’s going to affect every other group,” said Amy Bernstein of the National Center for Health Statistics, which put out the new report.


The report presents the latest data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics and dozens of other health agencies and organizations.


Among the new data: Deaths from heart disease, cancer, and stroke, the nation’s three leading killers, all dropped in 2003. They were down between 2% and 5%.


Also, Americans’ life expectancy increased again in 2003. According to the government’s calculations, a child born in 2003 can expect to live 77.6 years on average, up from 77.3 the year before. In 1990, life expectancy was 75.4.


For men, life expectancy in 2003 was 74.8, for women 80.1.


Life expectancy in America has been rising almost without interruption since 1900, thanks to several factors, including extraordinary advances in medicine and sanitation, and declines in some types of unhealthy behavior, such as smoking.


Those trends may allow life expectancy to continue to inch up despite the increases in obesity and high blood pressure, said the study’s director, Ms. Bernstein.


Still, health officials are trying to draw attention to unhealthy behavior, and this year chose to break out data on people 55 to 64.


The 55-to-64 age group is expected to rise from 29 million Americans in 2004 to 40 million in 2014. That is because of the baby boom, the explosion of births during the prosperous postwar period between 1946 and 1964.


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