Black Americans Dying Too Young

What they did

For the study, researchers reviewed U.S. death certificate data from the CDC, comparing the age-adjusted mortality rates between the Black population and the white population from 1999 to 2020.

They estimated the excess years of potential life lost among the Black population by comparing the age of premature death against typical life expectancy. In 2021, non-Hispanic white Americans had a life expectancy at birth of 76.4; for non-Hispanic Black Americans, it was 70.8, according to the CDC.

What’s behind the numbers?

Over the 22-year period, disproportionately higher mortality rates in Black men and women resulted in 997,623 and 628,464 excess deaths, respectively. Excess deaths and years of potential life lost were evident throughout most major causes of death, although heart disease was the most prominent for Black men and women, followed by cancer for Black men.

The researchers suggest that “disparities in rates of hypertension control and other factors associated with heart disease are in part responsible for this excess loss of life.” Research presented at a 2020 virtual meeting of the American Heart Association (AHA) found Black Americans are less likely to survive acute heart blockage and cardiac arrest than white Americans.

For that study, researchers reviewed medical records of 182,000 hospital patients admitted with cardiac arrest complications in the United States from 2012 to 2017, AARP reported.

The JAMA study noted that differences in loss of life were most prominent among infants, “with Black-White mortality and years of potential life lost rate ratios greater than 2.3 among those younger than 1 year old.”

“The sobering disparity noted in this study among infants and during childhood accounted for a markedly elevated number of excess deaths and an even more pronounced disparity in years of potential life lost. This excess mortality occurred in a period of life of highest vulnerability and warrants new dedicated public health initiatives targeting early childhood health,” the researchers wrote.

The pandemic effect

The researchers found that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the disparities highlighted in their study.

“Despite initial progress during the early 2000s, we found persistent excess mortality rates among non-Hispanic Black adults,” study lead author César Caraballo, M.D., a postdoctoral associate at Yale, said in a statement. “The abrupt worsening of these disparities in the first year of the pandemic indicates that current efforts to eliminate mortality disparities have been minimally effective and that progress has been fragile.”

The researchers said contributing factors included disproportionately higher infection exposure, financial instability, food insecurity and psychological distress, as well as persistently higher barriers to health care, higher prevalence of multi-morbidity and worse average health status.

“We need targeted strategies aimed at early childhood health and preventing heart disease and cancer, some of the main drivers of these disparities, to build a more equitable future,” Caraballo said.