Reanalysis of Middle Age Mortality Rates

Two days ago I commented on a study which found middle aged whites with little education were not living longer but were, in fact, starting to die somewhat younger due to alcoholism, drug abuse, cirrhosis and suicide. Along comes a statistician/demographer who gave the data a closer look.

Andrew Gelman posts at a site called Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. He writes:

Let me emphasize that this is all in no way a “debunking” of the Case and Deaton paper. Their main result is the comparison to other countries, and that holds up just fine. The place where everyone is confused is about the trends among middle-aged non-Hispanic white Americans.

The published curves were biased because they did not correct for the changing age distribution within the 45-54 bin. When we make the adjustment we find something different: no longer a steady increase. And when we look at men and women separately, we find something more.

Actually what we see is an increasing mortality among women aged 52 and younger—nothing special about the 45-54 group, and nothing much consistently going on among men.

So ... it's poor, white women who are dying somewhat younger than expected (though older than men), dying from substance abuse and suicide.  And this has happened since 2005, since the recession.

A coincidence? Probably not.