Gaps seen by education level in U.S. life expectancy

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People are living longer in the United States but those with no more than a high school education are not sharing in the trend, researchers said on Tuesday.

The education gap in expected lifespan dramatically widened in the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of smoking, according to the study by Harvard University researchers.

From 1990 to 2000, life expectancy for people with at least some college education rose 1.6 years while remaining static for less-educated people.

In 2000, those in the less-educated group could be expected at age 25 to live to about age 75 while those in the more-educated group could be expected to reach 82.

"Folks in this less-educated group you can think of as being disadvantaged on any number of dimensions," Ellen Meara, a health-care policy professor at Harvard Medical School who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.

"They're likely to have less income and they're likely to live in less amenable settings for making investments in health -- whether they live in neighborhoods with more crime or worse housing conditions or have worse access to health insurance."

Cigarette smoking appears to be playing an important role, the researchers wrote in the journal Health Affairs. Meara said highly educated people are less likely to smoke.

In the 1990s, two conditions caused by smoking -- lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis -- accounted for about 20 percent of the rising mortality disparity by education.

Looking at the 1980s and 1990s, the researchers found that the life expectancy gap grew by about 1.5 years per decade between those with no more than a high school education and those with at least some college education.

The gap grew from 2.8 years to 4.2 years in the period from 1981 to 1988, Meara said, and then from 1990 to 2000 grew from 5.4 years to seven years. The gap existed among whites and blacks. For example, the gap between college-educated black men and those who never went beyond high school was 8.4 years in 2000.

"We like to think that as we as a country get healthier, everyone benefits," Harvard's David Cutler, who also worked on the study, said in a statement. "Here we've found that you can have a rising tide that only lifts half the boats -- and the ones lifted are the ones doing better to begin with."

The findings were based on U.S. death certificate data, census population estimates and other information.

Other research in the journal also examined disparities among Americans.

One study showed that black and Latino children were 12 times more likely than white children to both come from a poor family and live in a neighborhood with a high rates of poverty, unemployment, households headed by a single woman and adults without a high school diploma.

A typical poor white child lives in a neighborhood with a poverty rate of about 14 percent, compared to 30 percent for a typical poor black child and 26 percent for a typical poor Latino child, the study found.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Bill Trott)