Adverse health trends for people born from the 70s onwards in Anglophone countries are the problem, researchers say.
Australians born since the early 70s are not seeing the longevity gains of some others, according to research just published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
“For the under-fifties in Australia, we found that life expectancy is behind the majority of high-income countries, which was quite surprising,” said lead author Dr Sergey Timonin, a demographer at the Australian National University. “We already knew that the US and UK suffer from this problem, but we didn’t expect to see Australia (as well as Canada and New Zealand) in this group.”
The ANU study compared life expectancy trends between a group of six English-speaking high-income countries – Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK and US – and non-Anglophone high income countries Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan.
From 2010 to 2019, all the Anglophone countries except Ireland had a smaller increase in life expectancy than their comparators, mainly due to the number of deaths in under-50s from injuries, including suicide, and drug and alcohol poisoning.
“Even if the USA still appears to be an anomaly among rich countries (in terms of adverse mortality trends), other HICs, and especially Anglophone countries, are not guaranteed to be immune to the factors underlying ‘American disease’,” the authors write.
“There is scope for English-speaking countries to improve the health of their younger populations and to halt the widening gap in mortality compared with other high-income countries,” added Dr Timonin.
Meanwhile, men older than 50 from English-speaking countries are not having the same problems. Data showed that, apart from in the US, they had a lower mortality than the comparison group because of lower mortality from CVD and cancer.
And elderly men born from 1930 to 1940 in Australia, Canada and New Zealand also had a survival advantage over the comparison group.
Elderly Australian women did too, but elderly Irish, New Zealander, Canadian women and women from the UK were worse off than their non-Anglophone peers.
Women of all ages had a lower survival rate in most Anglophone countries than in the comparisons due to higher mortality from cancer, dementia and respiratory diseases, except those in Canada and Australia who had lower CVD mortality.
Overall, Australian men and women across the age spectrum had a greater longevity in 2017-19 than Western European countries and Japan, along with Irish, New Zealander and Canadian men. Everyone else in the Anglophone countries had a lower life expectancy.
“Compared to English-speaking countries, Australians still enjoy a higher life expectancy, including at younger ages. It also has one of the world’s highest life expectancies at older ages,” Dr Timonin said.
