Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
New research comparing life expectancies across 6 English speaking countries reveals Australian women live nearly 4 years and men nearly 5 years longer than their American counterparts.
According to the study published in BMJ Open, Australians have the greatest life expectancies at birth compared to people in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.
However, the findings also highlight that while Australia offers a model for other countries to improve life expectancies, it still has a long way to go to reduce inequalities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Compared to the highest-performing Australian state, life expectancies in the Northern Territory where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders make up 30.8% of the population were 6.2 and 4.96 years lower for men and women, respectively.
Researchers compared life expectancies using data from the Human Mortality Database and the World Health Organization Mortality Database between 1990 and 2019.
Americans had the shortest life expectancy at birth, with women living an average of almost 81.5 years and men an average of nearly 76.5 years in 2019.
“One of the main drivers of why American longevity is so much shorter than in other high-income countries is our younger people die at higher rates from largely preventable causes of death, like drug overdose, car accidents and homicide,” says Jessica Ho, associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State University in the US and senior author on the paper.
“What the study shows is that a peer country like Australia far outperforms the US and was able to get its young adult mortality under control.
“It has really low levels of gun deaths and homicides, lower levels of drug and alcohol use and better performance on chronic diseases, the latter of which points to lifestyle factors, health behaviours and health care performance.”
At younger ages, Australia also has lower mortality from perinatal conditions and congenital anomalies, as well as lower motor vehicle accident mortality than similarly large (in terms of land area) countries with high driving rates, like the US and Canada.
The researchers say several factors may explain why life expectancy in Australia is higher than in other Anglophone countries, such as its history of immigration.
“Australia has the highest foreign-born share of its population, reaching nearly 30% in 2018. Prior studies have found that immigrants, who tend to have higher life expectancy than the native-born, can make important contributions to national life expectancy,” they write.
Australia also had a less severe smoking epidemic, particularly compared with the US and the UK, which the researchers say could contribute to lower mortality from respiratory diseases, cancers and circulatory diseases.
“Finally, a 2021 Commonwealth Fund report found that Australia’s healthcare system outperformed that of the UK, New Zealand, Canada and the USA,” the authors write.
“Australia experiences a mortality advantage from circulatory and respiratory diseases, cancers and perinatal and congenital conditions, which are linked to superior healthcare system performance (e.g., cancer screening and treatment, influenza vaccination, and cardiovascular disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment).”
