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Chicago:
US life expectancy will fall dramatically in coming years
because of obesity, a startling shift in a long-running
trend toward longer lives, researchers contend in a report
published on Thursday.
By their calculations—disputed by sceptics as shaky and
overly dire—within 50 years obesity likely will shorten the
average life span of 77.6 years by at least two to five
years. That’s more than the impact of cancer or heart
disease, said lead author S Jay Olshansky, a longevity
researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
This would reverse the mostly steady increase in American
life expectancy that has occurred in the past two centuries
and would have tremendous social and economic consequences
that could even inadvertently help “save’’ Social Security,
Olshansky and colleagues contend. “We think today’s younger
generation will have shorter and less healthy lives than
their parents for the first time in modern history unless we
intervene,’’ Olshansky said.
Already, the alarming rise in childhood obesity is fuelling
a new trend that has shaved four to nine months off the
average US life span, the researchers say. With obesity
affecting at least 15% of US school-age children, “it’s not
pie in the sky,’’ Olshansky said. “The children who are
extremely obese are already here.’’
The report appears in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In an accompanying editorial, University of Pennsylvania
demography expert Samuel H Preston calls the projections
“excessively gloomy’’. Opposing forecasts, projecting a
continued increase in US longevity, assume that obesity will
continue to worsen, but also account for medical advances,
Preston said. Still, failure to curb obesity “could impede
the improvements in longevity that are otherwise in store’’,
he said. Americans’ current life expectancy already trails
more than 20 other developed countries.
Dr David Ludwig of Children’s Hospital Boston, a study
co-author, cited sobering obesity statistics:
Two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese; one-third
of adults qualify as obese. t Up to 30% of US children are
overweight, and childhood obesity has more than doubled in
the past 25 years. t Childhood diabetes has increased
10-fold in the past 20 years.
“It’s one thing for an adult of 45 or 55 to develop type 2
diabetes and then experience the life-threatening
complications of that—kidney failure, heart attack,
stroke—in their late 50s or 60s. But for a 4-year-old or
6-year-old who’s obese to develop Type 2 diabetes at 14 or
16’’ raises the possibility of devastating complications
before reaching age 30, Ludwig said. “It’s really a
staggering prospect.’’ AP |
