Slowdown in Mortality Improvement in the Past Decade: A Us/UK Comparison

Emily Grundy , University of Essex
Michael Murphy , London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

The past decade (2010-2019) saw substantial reductions in the rate of mortality improvement in the UK, US and most other industrialised countries prompting intense debate especially in the US and UK. We investigate the slowdown in mortality improvement observed in the first decade of the 21st century in the US, UK and comparator countries and critically evaluate proposed explanations. Methods Change-point analysis to identify year of change in comparison of national mortality trends and linear spline models in investigation of sub-national differences using data from the Human Mortality Database, Global Burden of Disease cause-specific data and, for the UK, national statistics data. Consideration of the impact of using different methods to estimate overall mortality is also included together with a review of methodological assumptions made in previous studies. Results Results confirm the slowdown in mortality improvement observed in the early 21st century but indicate that proposed explanations for this are inadequate on a range of counts. Discussion Mortality improvement slowed down in the early 21st Century but explanations advanced, such as opioid use in the US or influenza epidemics and austerity programmes in the UK, seem unlikely to account for this. Further research considering longer term life-course and cohort influences is needed.

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 Presented in Session 72. International perspectives on mortality