It also suggests that the nation may be in line for further “unprecedented” stagnation, or even “sustained decline” in life expectancy moving forward, with boomers serving as the generation that shifted it all, kicking off a trend of progressively poorer health outcomes.
Boomers faring worse
“The 1950s birth cohort represents a transition from general improvements in earlier cohorts to deterioration across later cohorts,” the paper, published earlier this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reads.
While groups born in the 1970s-1990s faced increased mortality through the 2010s due to things like drug overdoses and accidents — causes most often associated with young people in any era — the numbers show that boomers were the next-worse off, and have fared worse across their lifetimes than earlier generations.
As explored by writers at The Economist, those with a birth year between 1946 and 1964 are, overall, far less healthy than those who came before them, and more likely than their elders to pass from cardiovascular disease once they hit their senior years.
This could be due to the prevalence of smoking and other “risky behaviours” from a young age, having been raised in a time when parenting and safeguards were more lax.
The paper cites worse rates of lung cancer mortality below age 60 in boomers relative to their predecessors, along with a higher likelihood of strokes and heart attacks at earlier ages.
Americans born in the 1950s specifically saw increased rates of “all major causes of death examined in this study,” which has been thought to be a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as well as multiple different drug crises and “the long-term disadvantages of the scarring effects these events caused.” But, “These troubling mortality patterns did not end with the baby boomers. They have persisted across subsequent generations,” the report states.
Decades of consistent improvement before a sudden cliff
The age of death for the average American nearly doubled over the century leading up to the 1980s, shooting from under 40 years old to around 75 as modern medicine revolutionized the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, introduced antibiotics, and mitigated risks during pregnancy and birth.
