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March 12, 2008Life Expectancy Rises for the Educated; The Less-educated Reap No Benefit |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: "We like to think that as we as a country get healthier, everyone benefits," says David Cutler, dean for social sciences at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and study co-author. "Here we've found that you can have a rising tide that only lifts half the boats---and the ones lifted are the ones doing better to begin with." The research, which was conducted by Cutler and Ellen Meara, assistant professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, appears in the March/April edition of the journal Health Affairs. Over the years, much attention has been paid to mortality rates based on socio-economic status, but less attention has been paid to recent trends in life expectancy, mortality, and education level. To understand recent mortality trends, Meara and Cutler combined death certificate data with census population estimates and data from the National Longitudinal Mortality Study. For 1990-2000, life expectancy rose an additional 1.6 years for better educated, while remaining fixed for the less educated. Overall in the groups studied, as of 2000, better educated at age 25 could expect to live to age 82; for less educated, 75. The researchers found that much of the mortality gap can be attributed to smoking related illnesses. Just two diseases usually caused by smoking, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (which comprises chronic bronchitis and emphysema), account for 20 percent of growing mortality differences in the 1990s. Harvard Medical School (http://hms.harvard.edu/hms/home.asp) has more than 7,500 full-time faculty working in 11 academic departments located at the School's Boston campus or in one of 47 hospital-based clinical departments at 17 Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals and research institutes.
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