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MEDIA CENTER Americans Die Younger and Weigh More than Canadians NEW YORK (6 October 2004) — On average, Americans die at an earlier age than Canadians. A comparison between the two countries shows that more than one-quarter of a million people in the United States died younger than their Canadian counterparts in 1998. (This is the most recent year for which directly comparable cause-of-death statistics are available.) The analysis, conducted by social scientists Barbara Boyle Torrey and Carl Haub, appears in the just-released September 2004 issue of the Population Council’s quarterly research journal Population and Development Review. Torrey and Haub note that 253,000 Americans died in 1998 who would not have died had they been Canadians. These “excess” deaths in the United States were especially notable among older women, middle-aged men, and nonwhites, although U.S. whites also had 165,000 excess deaths relative to Canadians of the same age and sex. Circulatory diseases were the major cause of excess U.S. deaths. The causes of these illnesses—which include all conditions affecting the heart and blood vessels, such as diabetes, heart attack, high cholesterol, hypertension, and stroke—are high blood pressure, smoking, and being overweight. In comparing these risk factors for 1998, the researchers noted that rates of hypertension were similar in the two countries. They also pointed out that although Canadians smoked more than Americans, the latter are more apt to be overweight. Men in the United States are twice as likely and women are three times as likely to be obese as Canadians. Although evidence is not available to prove that being overweight is the cause for the excess deaths, the existing data suggest that obesity does play an important role in Americans’ higher mortality relative to their Canadian counterparts. Comparisons of the level, age pattern, and causes of U.S. and Canadian mortality raise more questions than currently available data can answer. Consequently, the authors recommend that future investigations examine variables such as the relationship between income inequality and mortality, the differences in health insurance coverage, and the causes and consequences of obesity prevalence between the two countries. “If [obesity is] causing some of the excess mortality in the United States,” say the authors, “it may give a sinister new meaning to the nautical term ‘deadweight.’” Barbara Boyle Torrey is a visiting scholar at the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a nonprofit center for research and information dissemination. She was previously the executive director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Research Council and past president of the PRB. Torrey was also chief of the Center for International Research at the U.S. Census Bureau, deputy assistant secretary of income security policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, and an economist at the Office of Management and Budget. Carl Haub is a senior demographer and the Conrad Taeuber Chair of Public Information at the PRB. A specialist in the compilation and analysis of demographic data and dissemination, Haub has written numerous articles for both the academic and popular press on a broad range of topics. Noteworthy among his many publications is the World Population Data Sheet, which has an annual circulation of more than 40,000.
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