Education, not race, is the best predictor of life expectancy, researchers report.<\/p>\n
Life expectancy in the United States has been in decline for the first time in decades, and public health officials have identified a litany of potential causes, including inaccessible health care, rising drug addiction and rates of mental health disorders, and socioeconomic factors. But disentangling these variables and assessing their relative impact has been difficult.<\/p>\n
The new study attempted to tease out the relative impact of two variables most often linked to life expectancy, race, and education, by combing through data about 5,114 black and white individuals in four US cities.<\/p>\n
Researchers recruited the participants a longevity study approximately 30 years ago, when they were in their early 20s. Now they’re in their mid-50s.\u00a0 The individuals were part of the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study.<\/p>\n
Among the 5,114 people followed in the study, 395 had died. “These deaths are occurring in working-age people, often with children, before the age of 60,” says corresponding author Brita Roy, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Yale University.<\/p>\n
The rates of death among individuals in this group did clearly show racial differences, with approximately 9% of blacks dying at an early age compared to 6% of whites. There were also differences in causes of death by race. For instance, black men were significantly more likely to die by homicide and white men from AIDS. The most common causes of death across all groups over time were cardiovascular disease<\/a> and cancer.<\/p>\n
Strikingly, the researchers note, when looking at race and education<\/a> at the same time, differences related to race all but disappeared: 13.5% of black subjects and 13.2% of white subjects with a high school degree or less died during the course of the study. By contrast, 5.9% of black subjects and 4.3% of whites with college degrees had died.<\/p>\n
The study appears in the American Journal of Public Health<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n
Source: Yale University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"