Live Long And Prosper

Barb Arrigo: Live long and prosper?

An extensive set of data released today shows a distressing national trend in life spans for women over the 20-year period studied. Many are not living longer. As measured county by county, life expectancy for women actually declined in some places, with Southern and Appalachian counties showing up as particularly distressed. (Map here.) (Study summary here.)

Michigan largely escaped the trend. Three relatively small counties show up as having gone backward in female life expectancy, in the central and northern Lower Peninsula. They’re small enough counties that it could be a statistical fluke, or it may be an indication, as much of the rest of the map suggests, that rural health and rural health care are bigger issues than we might suspect. Metro Detroit shows up fairly well in comparison with most of the rest of the state, in terms of gains in female longevity – although it looks like most metro areas did at least as well and probably better.

For both sexes, Michigan shows up as at best average on the Washington Post’s map with the 2007 average mortality age for every county in the country. Bloomberg has the goods on which counties have the highest and lowest life expectancies nationwide; Michigan’s nowhere to be found. (Does working for the federal government boost longevity? The best county for men apparently was Fairfax in Virginia, just outside D.C.)

I suspect this data set probably skews overly positive for some retirement communities, reflecting that healthy, active people are more capable of and interested in making a major move once they retire. Still, Oakland County’s longevity (77.3 for men, 81.5 for women) is not that different from Maricopa County, Ariz. (76.8 for men, 81.6 for women), where Phoenix is, or Palm Beach County, Fla. (77.1, 83.5). And Leelanau County (often a retiree destination in Michigan) has strong numbers (78.6, 82.8) – maybe they’re wintering in FL.

But the shocker remains in the first map of the number of counties going backward in women’s longevity. The researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (created by the University of Washington to fill in gaps in health information) are tentatively tying that to smoking and obesity, but I’ve got to assume that there’s a big correlation with poverty as well.

The release says: “Change in life expectancy is so uneven that within some states there is now a decade difference between the counties with the longest lives and those with the shortest. States such as Arizona, Florida, Virginia and Georgia have seen counties leap forward more than five years from 1987 to 2007 while nearby counties stagnate or even lose years of life expectancy. In Arizona, Yuma County’s average life expectancy for men increased 8.5 years, nearly twice the national average, while neighboring La Paz County lost a full year of life expectancy, the steepest drop nationwide.