The bang for the buck is spending money on preventative care. Preventing a disease is much much cheaper than curing it!
3 Likes
Just got Robert Sapolsky’s new book “Determined”, and I’m watching some of the podcasts he’s doing. I suspect the factors discussed here are part of what are driving the low life expectancy in many parts of the US:
https://www.amazon.com/Determined-Science-Life-without-Free/dp/0525560971
2 Likes
I guess the one thing that I find really disturbing about the decline of the American lifespan is that I feel it is a choice. Americans are making poor decisions that are literally killing them! (Present company excluded)
Shouldn’t some of these things - such as a good diet and some exercise - be obvious?
I just listened to the Robert Sapolsky podcast (he’s a Stanford U. neuro-endocrinologist) and I think he sort of explains the issue that may be happening to many people in many parts of the US. Higher stress childhoods the prefrontal cortex does not grow well, and thus inhibitions of impulses (think fast food, and processed food) is much less regulated. Its not that these people don’t know that a healthy diet is a good idea, their brains can’t turn off the impulse for a quick hit of fat and sugar that is available in every corner of the country.
2 Likes
And, that is because children have high-stress childhoods? Not sure I buy that.
Asian children are the most stressed-out children I have seen (tiger parenting) and yet they are skinny beanpoles. Likewise, American children are quite low stress comparatively, and quite wide in berth.
It seems like he is grasping at causations and making generalizations.
Not run of the mill stresses like testing stress (though the levels of depression and anxiety are very high in tiger mom’s kids). The studies have all been done around “Adverse Childhood Events”, (or ACES, which Sapolsky references in the discussion), such as poverty, food insecurity, high conflict parents yelling and screaming a lot, violence in the household, addictions (alcohol and drugs), etc.
Scientific evidence is mounting that such adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have a profound long-term effect on health. Research shows that exposure to abuse and to serious forms of family dysfunction in the childhood family environment are likely to activate the stress response, thus potentially disrupting the developing nervous, immune, and metabolic systems of children.[2][3][4] ACEs are associated with lifelong physical and mental health problems that emerge in adolescence and persist into adulthood,[5] including cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, autoimmune diseases, substance abuse, and depression.[6][7][8]
Lots of research links these with higher rates of ADHD (up to 30X higher) with higher ACE scores. The higher levels of glucocorticoids and cortisol play havoc on a developing brain.
Its a standard part of health screening now in many California hospitals:
6 Likes
When you put it that way, it does seem that American children have more ACEs than Asian children. In the richest country in the world, there is still grinding poverty, food insecurity and immature parenting…
Why can’t we fix this? It’s just sad. 
2 Likes
RPS
#133
I don’t buy that either.
Is that bad stuff really happening in the “majority” of US households? If so the rot set in well over a generation ago.
no, I don’t think these issues are evident in most households, but a significant portion. Some states are worse than others. I think it becomes a significant issue when you have an “ACE score” of 3+. Ultimately, its just one factor in the longevity equation. But sadly, this happens to people in childhood when the child has little control of the situation, yet has serious lifelong consequences…
Key Findings
- Economic hardship and divorce or separation of a parent or guardian are the most common ACEs reported nationally, and in all states.
- Just under half (45 percent) of children in the United States have experienced at least one ACE, which is similar to the rate of exposure found in a 2011/2012 survey.* In Arkansas, the state with the highest prevalence, 56 percent of children have experienced at least one ACE.
- One in ten children nationally has experienced three or more ACEs, placing them in a category of especially high risk. In five states—Arizona, Arkansas, Montana, New Mexico, and Ohio—as many as one in seven children had experienced three or more ACEs.
- Children of different races and ethnicities do not experience ACEs equally. Nationally, 61 percent of black non-Hispanic children and 51 percent of Hispanic children have experienced at least one ACE, compared with 40 percent of white non-Hispanic children and only 23 percent of Asian non-Hispanic children. In every region, the prevalence of ACEs is lowest among Asian non-Hispanic children and, in most regions, is highest among black non-Hispanic children.
Results
Of the 8199 evaluable adolescents, 65.8% had experienced at least one ACE and 28% of those had experienced more than one ACE. Household dysfunction was the most prevalent ACE subtype. The biggest overlaps among the three ACE sub-types were seen in those reporting neglect or abuse.
1 Like
Poverty and single-parent households tend to go hand in hand along with child neglect. It’s terrible that most ACEs are related. If you have one, you are at much higher risk for more.
2 Likes
Yes - but its not just poverty… I know of screaming, alcoholic investment bankers who make $1 million+ per year and have really harmed their children.
2 Likes
Yes, that’s a whole 'nother can of C. Elegans. 
Alcoholism + Parenting is not a good mix.
In the end, I try to focus on my own family. It’s too easy to get overwhelmed by the problems of the world. Although I wish things would get better instead of getting worse.
Why does every generation think they are doing a worse job than the previous one? There’s got to be some psychological phenomenon related to that!
2 Likes
Of the 242 NUTS 2 regions – the EU’s system for dividing economic territory – Bulgaria’s Severozapazen had an average life expectancy of 69.7 years, whereas the highest was observed in Madrid, Spain at 85.4.
By Sudesh Baniya
Published on 10/11/2023
2 Likes
AnUser
#139
Communism really destroyed the life expectancy in a lot of european countries even decades later.
2 Likes
I haven’t dug deep into this issue, but it seems that life expectancies were good in the Eastern European countries until the dissolution of the former Soviet Union and subsequent conversion to capitalism…
From the Economist:
It was not always that way. In the mid-1960s Latvians and Lithuanians still blew out as many birthday candles as the citizens of Cyprus and France. But after a long period of convergence caused by reductions in child mortality, the east of the continent gradually fell behind after the iron curtain descended. Bad habits and unhealthy environments are contributory factors to chronic illnesses such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease, and eastern Europe is home to more smokers and more heavy drinkers according to the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA), an NGO. Hungarians face the poorest odds when it comes to chronic ill-health, but rates are also high in much of Poland, Slovakia, and Croatia.
Full Economist Article: Why life expectancy is lower in eastern Europe
Indeed, in less than 20 years, the latter [Eastern European Countries] had nearly succeeded in catching up with the countries of northern and western Europe (see Figure 1). Since the mid-1960s, however, the situation has once again changed entirely. The countries of eastern Europe, then governed by Communist regimes, were struck by a health crisis that considerably hampered their progress, and in some cases life expectancy even declined, especially among males; at the same time, after a period of stagnation in the 1960s, the west began to progress once again thanks to new advances in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. By 1995, this divergent movement had transformed the European life expectancy map, and the new line of separation now corresponded to that of the former Iron Curtain.
https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_201_0171--mortality-in-europe-the-divergence-betwe.htm
2 Likes
AnUser
#141
Another example today is life expectancy of south korea vs. north korea.
It is impossible to trust numbers from the soviet era IMO.
2 Likes
scta123
#142
What has communism got to do with life expectancy 35 years later?
Goran
#143
Wow, did Norway get nuked out of the map?
2 Likes
Goran
#145
Iceland and Switzerland is not part of the EU either
2 Likes
