Death rate recently increased for a large segment of middle-aged U.S. whites

[kalibex]

A large segment of white middle-aged Americans has suffered a startling rise in its death rate since 1999, according to a review of statistics published Monday that shows a sharp reversal in decades of progress toward longer lives.

The mortality rate for white men and women ages 45-54 with less than a college education increased markedly between 1999 and 2013, most likely because of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and suicide, the researchers concluded. Before then, death rates for that group dropped steadily, and at a faster pace.

_https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-group-of-middle-aged-american-whites-is-dying-at-a-startling-rate/2015/11/02/47a63098-8172-11e5-8ba6-cec48b74b2a7_story.html_

In addition, two prestigious medical journals refused to publish this specific study before PNAS published it:

A startling new study that shows a big spike in the death rate for a large group of middle-aged whites in the United States was rejected by two prestigious medical journals, the study’s co-author, Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, said Tuesday.

There's your 'publishing bias' on display, right there.

_https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/11/03/prestigious-medical-journals-rejected-stunning-study-on-deaths-among-middle-aged-whites/_

 

[Solie123]

Clear as daylight.

And these are the sources we're suppose to trust?... Hmm.

It's funny that the JAMA (one of the magazines that refused to publish this study) publishes this:

Meat Consumption and Risk of Colorectal Cancer
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=200150&resultClick=3

So much for credibility on that. :P

 

[Mr. Premise]

Interesting comment on this by the blogger Ran Prieur (ranprieur.com):

November 4. Lots of buzz this week about the discovery of rising death rates among middle-aged white Americans. This can't be explained purely by economics, because other demographics in the same bad economy are still living slightly longer. The least interesting explanation is probably the most accurate: a lot of these deaths are from opioids that have become much more common in the last 15 years, especially among the people who are dying.

But I can tell a story tying it to American culture: These people are 1) not college educated, which means they're less mentally adaptable, 2) middle-aged, which means they're old enough to have grown up thinking they were going to be richer some day, and 3) white, which means they see themselves as Clint Eastwood-like isolated warriors who don't know how to create personal value outside of a competitive environment in which they have turned out to be the losers. The scary thing is that America could fall into a feedback loop, where the worse it gets, the more people support exactly the wrong radical politicians who make things even worse. [\quote]