Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
A new study reveals that Australian people under the age of 50 are facing stagnating life expectancy.
The comparative study examined longevity trends in 6 English-speaking (Anglophone) countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These were then compared with other high-income countries.
The research is published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Among younger cohorts, Australia is ahead of the US, UK and Canada. But it is trending worse than other non-Anglophone, high-income countries.
“For the under fifties in Australia, we found that life expectancy is behind the majority of high-income countries, which was quite surprising,” says lead author Sergey Timonin, a demographer from the Australian National University.
“We already knew that the US and UK suffer from this problem, but we didn’t expect to see Australia (as well as Canada and New Zealand) in this group,” Timonin says.
“However, compared to English-speaking countries, Australians still enjoy a higher life expectancy, including at younger ages,” Timonin adds. “It also has one of the world’s highest life expectancies at older ages.”
According to 2022 Australian Bureau of Statistics data, life expectancy for males in Australia is 81.2 years. For females it is 85.3. This compares to 79.0 and 82.9 for males and females respectively in the UK in 2022, and 74.8 and 80.2 respectively in the US.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, stagnating life expectancies had been reported in some high-income countries. But there has been a lack of comparative studies to provide more detail on the phenomenon.
“In the pre-pandemic period in 2010–19, the increase in life expectancy slowed in all Anglophone countries, except Ireland, mainly due to stagnating or rising mortality at young adults and middle-aged adults under fifty,” Timonin explains.
The study found life expectancy among younger Australians was impacted by suicide, drugs and alcohol, and traffic accidents.
“External causes of death and substance use disorders were found to be the largest contributors to the observed disadvantage at these ages,” Timonin says.
While future rises in life expectancy will depend on reducing mortality at older ages, the researcher warn about adverse health trends among younger people.
“This emerging and avoidable threat to health equity in English-speaking countries should be the focus of further research and policy action,” Timonin says.
A separate study published in Nature Aging shows that the rise in human life expectancy is slowing globally.
Advances in medicine and public health led to increases in human life expectancy of about 3 years per decade during the 20th century. Some forecasts from the 1990s suggested that most children born in the 21st century would live to 100 years or more.
But mortality data from the 9 regions with the highest current life expectancies – Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain – between 1990 and 2019 shows deceleration in the rise of life expectancy globally. This trend was most notable in the US.
