Why Americans Aren't Living Longer

Broadcast Retirement Network’s Jeffrey Snyder discusses the impact of diseases like heart disease and cancer on Americans’ longevity with Tuft University’s Leah Abrams.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Joining me now is Professor Leah Abrams of Tufts University. Professor Abrams, great to see you. Thanks for joining us this morning.

Leah Abrams, Tufts University

Thanks so much for having me.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

And as we were talking about in the virtual green room, I’m really excited about talking about aging and longevity. You and the team at Tufts have done a lot of research. Let me start off with a basic question.

And excluding the pandemic, which obviously had an impact on longevity and mortality, have humans continued to extend their longevity and their lifespans?

Leah Abrams, Tufts University

Yeah, in general, we are seeing improvements over time in life expectancy across the world and in longevity and in the US, but there are always these exceptions. So like you said, the pandemic, there was a way higher mortality than usual and life expectancy went down. That can happen during other kinds of crises like during wars.

Sometimes there’s so much life loss that life expectancy will go down. But besides those sort of exceptional cases, in general, we expect life expectancy and longevity to continue improving over time. And that’s what’s happened historically for the most part.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Yeah. And I guess I would, as someone in middle age, I would view that as a good thing.

Leah Abrams, Tufts University

It’s a good thing.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

That’s what we want. I think overall, it’s probably a good thing. We can talk about some of the consequences, societal issues a little bit later.

When you looked at the cohort, and I know you did a lot of research here, are there certain generations of humans, whether they’re senior people that are boomers, millennials, that have maybe done better from a longevity perspective than others just looking at the data sources?

Leah Abrams, Tufts University

Yeah, that’s what our most recent study was really focused on, because life expectancy in the United States, improvements have stalled in the last decade or so. And we were interested in sort of which age groups and which generations were driving those stalls. And what we found is that baby boomer cohorts, which were people born between 1950 and 1959, were sort of this transition group, where before them, every generation or birth cohort, as we sometimes call them, was doing better than the generation born before them.

And then that 1950 to 1959 group actually did worse than the folks born before them. And all the cohorts after, they didn’t have improvements as big as we had been seeing previously. And so that was sort of a turning point.

And then we saw another generation, which was those born around 1975, I think it was like 1970 to 85, are also doing a bit worse than the people born before them. So we seem to have lost this steady improvement that we had for generations.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Is there any indication by looking, that concerns me, obviously, because I’m in a later generation, not in the generations you talked about. And you would think that in successive generations, we would do better economically, financially, et cetera. But is there any rationale as to why that is occurring?

Is it environmental, meaning more sun, more radiation? Is it we have a bad environment? Are there any hints from looking at the data?

Leah Abrams, Tufts University

Yeah, we have some hypotheses for the baby boomer cohort. For example, there’s probably a lot of different forces happening at the same time. So some could be that they were in really specific ages during historical crises that kind of scarred that generation’s health and mortality going forward.

So things like the HIV AIDS crisis, or the heroin opioid crisis that might have impacted that generation, given what age they were when those crises happened. Another hypothesis is that the baby boomer is a large cohort, it’s inherent in the name, it was a baby boom, which means there might have been more scarcity for resources for that generation. Another hypothesis is sort of about like the culture and norms of that generation, which involves some like rebellion and defiance.

There was like earlier smoking in baby boomers. And that all can affect things like cardiovascular disease, cancer, drug overdose deaths. So there could be a lot of sort of unique factors happening at once for baby boomers.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Are there things that we can control? Like we can’t control certain environmental factors. But there are things as individuals, you can’t control your DNA and your genetic predisposition.

But from the research, and maybe this is more anecdotal, but are there things that we can do to make our longevity improve?

Leah Abrams, Tufts University

Yeah, one thing our study really pointed to was the importance of diet and dietary behaviors, because the diseases that we were focused on were cardiovascular disease, cancers, and external causes of death. External causes is things like drug overdose, accidents, suicides. But for cardiovascular disease and cancer, those are two of the most leading causes of death in the US.

And those two are causes where we did see these sort of adverse trends for recent generations. And for cancer specifically, the most concerning trends were for colon cancer, which is really driven by diet. And so the thing that things that are within people’s control are diet as a sort of preventive measure, and then also disease management.

So getting screenings for cancer and screenings for hypertension, for cholesterol, and then managing those symptoms and diseases as they progress is sort of within a person’s control and maybe what they can do despite sort of whatever generation they’re born in and whatever environment they’re born into.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Some of those professor seem, you know, it seems like very educational. And I think we’re doing a lot of education. I don’t think you can turn on the TV or look at some social media posts without an ad somewhere around getting, you know, reducing your ultra processed food consumption or lowering your cholesterol, right?

I mean, is there another, you know, just and again, anecdotally, looking at the research, are there things we can do better from a maybe an education point of view? So you can’t make people not eat Fritos. I mean, if people want to eat Fritos, they’re going to eat Fritos.

But are there things we can do better in terms of getting people more on board with making the right life changes?

Leah Abrams, Tufts University

Yeah, I think it is maybe a combination of education and actually the environment. So the food environment someone’s born into, which means like, do they have access to grocery stores that have healthy foods or just convenient stores that have snack foods? Can they afford the healthy foods that are in the stores?

Those are sort of actually environmental and policy factors that can shape individual behavior. And I think it’s a combination. It’s not just do people know the right thing to eat?

Or do they know if they need to get screened? But also, are they in an environment? Do they have the resources to really act on that knowledge?

I think both pieces are important.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Yeah. But a lot of these screenings that you were mentioning are covered by some level of health care. So whether you went, you know, through the exchange, or you have corporate insurance, or even if you’re on Medicare, I think like a lot of these screening, correct me if I’m wrong, they are available to people you could and if not their minimal costs.

Leah Abrams, Tufts University

Yeah, so people have to have the insurance coverage, right to access that kind of benefit. They have to have the time out of their work schedule in order to go to the doctor, they have to have access to a clinic and that’s that they can get transportation to. So even if insurance covers them, there can be barriers.

But yeah, in general, there are guidelines for these kinds of screenings. And one implication of our finding is that maybe we need to think about colon cancer differently for young people. Our findings showed increasing mortality in colon cancer for people who are only in their 30s and 40s, where cancer screening might not even be on their radar yet.

And so that’s a real concern that it might be going up at those young ages where people need to start thinking about their diet and their family history and whether they need to be screened a little earlier, whether guidelines will change, I think is to be determined. But that’s one of the implications of what we’re finding in mortality trends.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

In terms of your next level of research, what do you hope to achieve? You know, this, I guess is a one set of data and one set one report based on that data. But do you have future ideas for future research that might look at other aspects of aging?

Like, you know, could the human body, for example, live to 150? I don’t know if that’s possible. But I mean, so what ideas do you have in terms of this aging research and what comes next?

Leah Abrams, Tufts University

Yeah, one of the big findings coming out of our group has been that cardiovascular disease trends are really driving this stall in life expectancy improvements. Cardiovascular disease had been declining for decades in the United States thanks to people quitting smoking. We had medical advances, there were dietary improvements, and those improvements in heart disease have sort of stalled out.

And we’re not sure exactly why. And it seems like returning declines in heart disease is really key to returning improvements in life expectancy. So that’s one area we’re really focused on is figuring out how do we continue to improve trends in heart disease.

And then another one is just always trying to keep up with the latest data. And so this project went through 2019 because we were kind of interested in long-term trends over the past, like, five decades. But obviously, there was the pandemic after that, which we look at a little bit in this study.

And most recently, mortality data from 2024 was released. And so now we’re looking at 2024 data with the question of have we, as a country, completely recovered from COVID-19 mortality? Are we back to 2019 rates?

And are we back up onto trends that we had before the COVID-19 pandemic? Or are we on, like, a totally different trajectory now? And that sort of remains to be determined.

And that’s what I think we’d like to figure out next.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Yeah, well, it’s certainly interesting. And as someone, as I said, who has a vested interest in the longer, the longevity, I’m certainly interested. Professor, great to see you.

Thanks for joining us. Great research. And we look forward to having you back on the program again very soon.

Leah Abrams, Tufts University

Thank you so much. Great to be here.

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