A soybean farmer from Mississippi County, Arkansas.
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If you were born in the south, you may have a shorter life expectancy compared to the rest of the United States, according to data recently released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday.
The findings, published by vital national statistical reports, examined state-level mortality and population estimates in 2018, as well as specific death and state figures for that year’s Medicare beneficiaries.
The CDC found that Americans are expected to live 78.7 years at birth, although women were more likely to survive than 5-year-old men nationally, according to the report. Southern states performed worse compared to their northeastern and western counterparts.
West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, South Carolina and Missouri ranked in the top ten states for life expectancy, respectively, the CDC found. West Virginia, which had a life expectancy of 74.4 years, ranked lowest for both men and women.
“With a few exceptions, the states with the largest sex differences are those with the lowest life expectancy at birth, while the lowest sex differences are found mostly in the states with the highest life expectancy,” the researchers wrote. CDC in the report.
Meanwhile, Hawaii ranked first for the state with the longest life expectancy at 81 years old. Aloha State was followed by California, New York, Minnesota, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, New Jersey and Rhode Island to end the top ten states where you will live the longest.
The latest figures for the CDC’s life expectancy come just one month after the agency released an interim report in February, which found that life expectancy during the pandemic fell by one year in the first half of 2020 – the most great decline since World War II.
According to this report, the CDC predicted that the life expectancy of Americans at birth in 2020 was 77.8 years.
– Reuters contributed to this report.