Life expectancy up for first time in four years, while drug overdose deaths drop by 4%

There's rare good news in health: New federal reports on life expectancy and drug overdoses showed improvement in 2018.

showed improvement in 2018, brightening the bleak public health picture of the last few years.

Americans can expect to live to an average age of 78.7 years, a gain of a tenth of a year compared to 2017 figures released a year ago. Perhaps more importantly, the gain reversed a three-year trend of decreases or no gains in life expectancy. The 10 leading causes of death remained the same for the third year in a row and the only increases were from suicides and the flu coupled with pneumonia. In addition to lower death rates for heart disease and cancer, deaths rates also dropped for unintentional injuries, lower respiratory diseases, stroke and Alzheimer's.

He credits the overdose antidote, naloxone, which states and cities have made available so emergency workers and others can save the lives of people overdosing on opiods. But naloxone is a"last resort" that doesn't get at the root causes of why people turn to drugs or suicide, Miller noted.

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