Daily Dose: COVID-19, Opioid Epidemic Primary Drivers of Widening Gender Gap in Life Expectancy

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Patient Care brings primary care clinicians a lot of medical news every day—it’s easy to miss an important study. The Daily Dose provides a concise summary of one of the website's leading stories you may not have seen.

Last week, we reported on findings from a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that examined the widening gender gap in US life expectancy.

The study

Researchers conducted a cross-sectional study to examine overall and gender-specific life expectancy, as well as contributors (eg, COVID-19 pandemic, unintentional poisoning [mostly drug overdose) to changes in life expectancy from 2010 to 2021, using data from the National Center for Health Statistics. They divided the data by pre-COVID-19 (2010-2019) and post-COVID-19 years (2019-2021).

Findings

Results showed that the gender life expectancy gap increased 0.23 years from 2010 to 2019 and 0.7 years from 2019 to 2021.

The largest contributors to worsening life expectancy in men compared with women before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 included:

• unintentional injuries (‒0.23 years);

• diabetes (‒0.05 years);

• suicide (‒0.04 years);

• homicide (‒0.03 years); and

• cardiovascular disease (‒0.03 years).

Authors' comment

"Future analyses could explore whether these trends changed after 2021, especially as the pandemic recedes, with further detail on specific causes."

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