A Cross-National Comparison on Life Expectancy of Non-Hispanic White Americans

Abstract

Objectives: Taking the life expectancy (LE) of Non-Hispanic White (NHW) Americans as an example to provide potential references for improving LE globally.Methods: We collected complete data from the United States (US) CDC, Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom (UK), and the OECD publications, and described LE changes of NHW Americans by cross-national comparison and Arriaga’s method.Results: LE of NHW Americans was not as optimistic as European countries from 2006 to 2018. The LE annual average growth rate was 0.04% for NHW Americans, 0.19% for the UK population, and the median of 25 countries was 0.24%. Compared with the other age groups, the age group 30–34 revealed an inferior impact on the LE of NHW people, of which accidents and intentional self-harm were likely to be the top two direct causes.Conclusion: Finding out the direct causes that affect the LE growth in different age groups is conducive to making a targeted intervention or solving the LE growth bottleneck.