Americans Born After 1970 Are Dying Faster Than Previous Generations Did At Their Age

Research Tracking 45 Years of American Mortality Finds Heart Disease, Cancer, Overdose Deaths Are All Getting Worse

For most of the 20th century, a quiet assumption ran through American life: each generation would outlive the one before it. Better medicine, better food, better lives. It held true, decade after decade, until it stopped. An analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that younger Americans are failing to outlive earlier generations, dying faster at the same ages from some of the most common causes in the country. Researchers behind the study warn that the worst may still be ahead.

Between 2010 and 2019, U.S. life expectancy improved by only 0.26 years, compared to an average gain of 1.78 years per decade over the previous five decades. Already trailing its peers, the United States has fallen further behind. Among 22 peer nations, the gap in life expectancy at birth between the US and the top-performing country grew from 2.6 years to 4.7 years between 1983 and 2009. Stagnation barely covers what those numbers describe.

A different approach from most mortality research drove this analysis. Rather than asking what happened to death rates in a given year, the researchers asked what happened to people born in a given generation and tracked their death rates as they aged. What they found reframes the entire problem.

How Researchers Tracked a Generation-by-Generation Decline in U.S. Life Expectancy

Most research on American mortality looks at trends year by year. That approach is useful, but it misses something important: people born in the same era share experiences that shape their health across their entire lives. A person born in 1975 grew up during a specific economic climate, faced particular public health crises, and developed habits shaped by the culture of their youth, carrying those influences into middle and old age.

To capture these generational patterns, the research team used a specialized chart called a Lexis diagram, which allows scientists to track death rates simultaneously by age, calendar year, and birth generation. Rather than plotting raw death numbers, the team mapped the rate of change in mortality over time, looking at whether death rates were improving, stagnating, or getting worse at any given age and year. Primary data ran from 1979 to 2019, with supplementary data extending to 2023, covering generations born from the 1890s through the 1980s, drawn from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Human Mortality Database.

Researchers examined deaths from all causes combined, as well as three major categories: cardiovascular disease, cancer, and external causes such as drug overdoses, suicides, homicides, and traffic accidents.

Americans Born in the 1950s Marked a Turning Point in Life Expectancy

One of the study’s clearest findings centers on Americans born between 1950 and 1959. Across every major cause of death examined, this group showed worse death rates compared to people born just before them, when both groups are measured at the same ages. People born in the 1940s tended to see steadily improving survival at each stage of life. For those born in the 1950s, that improvement slowed or reversed.

Researchers describe this cohort as a generational turning point, where a long run of improving survival rates gave way to a pattern of deterioration that has persisted and deepened in every generation since. Several explanations have been proposed in prior research: the widespread uptake of cigarette smoking at young ages, the long-term damage caused by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and early waves of opioid addiction, and the toll of a generation shaped partly by social instability. Sharply worse lung cancer death rates below age 60 for this cohort are consistent with early smoking patterns, the researchers note.

On top of these generational patterns, the researchers identified a separate, nationwide deterioration that began around 2010 and affected nearly every adult alive at the time, regardless of when they were born. Someone in their 30s in 2012 experienced worsening trends. So did someone in their 70s. This society-wide setback was driven primarily by cardiovascular disease, which had been declining for decades before its progress stalled.

In short, the country is contending with two overlapping crises: a generational one, in which successive birth cohorts have fared worse than those before them, and a more recent one, in which the entire country’s health trajectory bent downward at roughly the same moment.

Why cardiovascular disease improvement stalled so sharply after 2010 has no clean answer. Possibilities include rising obesity rates, diminishing returns from anti-smoking campaigns, and the likelihood that modern medicine has kept alive a larger pool of people with serious underlying heart conditions, meaning the population itself now carries more inherent risk. Continued improvements in other high-income countries suggest that “human-made factors are limiting U.S. life expectancy improvement,” rather than biological limits alone on how long humans can live, the researchers write.

Why Americans Born After 1970 Are the Generation Researchers Are Most Worried About

Among all the findings, the most alarming concerns Americans born after 1970. At the ages these people have already reached, roughly 30 to 49 depending on the cause of death examined, they are already dying at higher rates from heart disease, cancer, and external causes than people born just before them were dying at those same ages. Colon cancer, strongly tied to obesity and diet, is a particular concern, with death rates rising at younger ages beginning with cohorts born around 1955 and worsening from there.

Drug overdose deaths, which increased sharply beginning in the late 1990s, hit post-1970 cohorts especially hard. Among women, suicide death rates began worsening around 2000 and, by 2010, affected nearly every age group. Homicide and traffic accident death rates also worsened in the 2010s.

Because people born after 1970 are still in the middle stages of their lives, the full damage has not yet shown up in overall life expectancy figures. These generations have decades of aging ahead of them, and if their elevated death rates at young and middle ages are any indication, their outcomes in old age could drag down American life expectancy in ways not yet fully felt. Researchers describe this trajectory as pointing toward a possible “unprecedented longer-run stagnation, or even sustained decline, in US life expectancy.”

No single cause explains any of this, and the paper does not test which factors mattered most. Cigarette smoking laid the groundwork for cancer and heart disease deaths in older generations. Obesity is shaping the health of younger ones. Researchers point to rising economic and social inequality, the opioid epidemic, and stress as likely forces, noting that these upstream factors may affect multiple causes of death simultaneously: smoking drives both cancer and heart disease, stress is linked to cardiovascular risk and substance abuse, and cancer treatments can in turn worsen heart health.

Researchers do not test specific policy solutions in this paper, but they point to rising economic and social inequality as a driver of American mortality trends, and note that “policies aimed at reducing social inequalities and improving resources for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups can be powerful levers in improving national trends.” Worth noting as well: modest improvements in death rates in 2018 and 2019 were erased by sharply rising mortality between 2019 and 2022, with only partial recovery by 2023.

For the generations coming up behind the baby boomers, what this analysis describes is less a temporary stumble in an otherwise upward march than a long-running warning sign that has been building for decades. Successive cohorts are arriving at middle age already carrying higher mortality burdens than their predecessors did, and they have decades left to age into a system still struggling to explain why.

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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Readers should consult a qualified healthcare professional with questions about personal health, risk factors, symptoms, or prevention strategies related to heart disease, cancer, substance use, mental health, or any other medical condition.

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