![]() ![]() “It’s grandparents not at the table or older parents not around,” Krumholz says. Weathering can shorten a person’s life by decades, and even five or 10 years is a big loss. These stresses can lead to an early death. “By the time you’re a teenager, you’re already obese you’re already developing high blood pressure,” Cooper says. Over time, the combined effects of many chronic stresses-both physical and mental-simply wear many people down. But excess deaths start to increase when Black kids are in their midteens, and the numbers continue to rise through adulthood.Ĭooper draws on epidemiologist Arline Geronimus’s observation of “ weathering,” which describes how Black people tend to age faster than white people. The new findings are in line with previous research showing that Black babies tend to have lower birth weights than white babies for reasons researchers don’t yet understand, Harris says.įrom ages one to 14, Black children have only a slightly higher chance of dying than white children. For every 100,000 children born, about 700 more Black kids die during their first year of life than white kids. Relatively higher health risks among Black people start at an early age, Krumholz and his colleagues found. “All of those things, I would venture to say, contributed,” she says. The recent study does not address why assault rates increased in this population, but Cooper speculated that pandemic-related stress increased interpersonal violence, which was compounded by law enforcement systemically targeting Black men. For the Black male population, deaths from assault also surged. Indirect effects of the pandemic also exacerbated other health conditions: heart disease spiked again, for example. The disease was a leading cause of death among Black people, as it was in other marginalized populations. Then, in 2020, COVID hit the U.S., obliterating any progress on reducing health disparities over the past two decades. The same socioeconomic disadvantages that led to high rates of heart disease made the Black population especially vulnerable. A few decades later the effects were reflected in death rates. ![]() In the 1970s and 1980s heavily processed foods became cheap and plentiful in the U.S. “I think it really had to do with obesity,” Harris says. Around 2011 the gap between Black and white excess deaths stabilized. Improvements in cancer treatment also helped reduce mortality. She links the decline to the fact that cholesterol and hypertension drugs-both of which reduce the risk of heart disease-started to become more widely available in Black communities. “Such a glorious time,” says demographer Kathleen Mullan Harris of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the study. In the early 2000s heart disease began to drop in the Black population, and the overall health gap between Black and white people diminished. It’s “almost like a cascading effect” on overall health, Cooper says.Ĭredit: Amanda Montañez Source: “Excess Mortality and Years of Potential Life Lost among the Black Population in the U.S., 1999–2020,” by César Caraballo et al., in Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. And living in a racist society takes an additional toll on mental health. For example, economic barriers often lead to Black people living in places where it’s difficult to access healthy food, space to exercise or adequate health care. There are multiple reasons for this, says epidemiologist and internal medicine physician Lisa Cooper of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, who did not work on the new study. Data from death certificates showed that 1.63 million more Black people died, compared with the white population, over the 22 years of the study, which was published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.Ī handful of conditions, heart disease chief among them, caused many of these deaths. ![]() Instead he and his colleagues discuss excess deaths: the number of deaths among Black people that exceed those among white people after accounting for differences in the age distribution and size of each community. Researchers often talk about health disparities between races as simply differences-vague phrasing that fails to communicate that such disparities should not exist, Krumholz says. Credit: Amanda Montañez Source: “Excess Mortality and Years of Potential Life Lost among the Black Population in the U.S., 1999–2020,” by César Caraballo et al., in Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. ![]()
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