Life expectancy falls in poorer U.S. counties: study

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Life expectancy may have reached an all-time high for the United States, but it is declining in many poor counties, especially among women, researchers reported on Monday.

Smoking, obesity and high blood pressure are taking the lives of women in Appalachia, Mississippi River states and parts of Texas, a team at Harvard School of Public Health reported.

"There has been increasing disparity in health in the U.S. population for two decades," said Majid Ezzati of the school's department of population and international health, who led the study.

"The people who are worst off are either not getting better or are worse off" than they had been, Ezzati added in a telephone interview.

Last September, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that U.S. life expectancy had risen to almost 78 years in 2005 -- up from 75.8 years in 1995 and 69.6 years in 1955. The United States ranks around 42nd in the world in life expectancy.

The CDC noted that U.S. whites will live longer than blacks, and women longer than men. But Ezzati found many exceptions to this rule.

"Female mortality increased in a large number of counties, primarily because of chronic diseases related to smoking, overweight and obesity, and high blood pressure," the researchers wrote in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.

Ezzati and colleagues analyzed death rates in all counties of the U.S. states from 1961 to 1999.