Life expectancy in Britain has flatlined in the last ten years—a quarter of a million are missing
*Population-weighted average of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, SwitzerlandBut Britain’s performance has been the worst of the lot. It began the 1980s in the middle of the pack, but by the end of the 2010s it was last among a group of 12 of its peers.
A difference of 2.2 years, the equivalent of 26 months, may not sound like much. But even small movements in life expectancy represent large changes in a country of 68m people. Finally, to convert life expectancy to absolute numbers of deaths we have made a simplifying assumption that gains and losses in life expectancy reflect death rates which change proportionally among all age groups. In practice, death rates can rise and fall at differential rates across the population: the elderly were more at risk from covid-19, for example.
Take cardiovascular disease, which for the past half a century contributed the largest gains to life expectancy in rich countries. Those who survive heart attacks are at greater risk of developing valvular heart disease, which if untreated can result in heart failure. “So while we’ve seen heart-attack deaths going down, we’ve actually seen the numbers of cases of heart failure and heart-failure deaths going up,” says Mike Stewart, chief medical officer at James Cook.
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