Life expectancy in Europe keeps rising, despite the obesity epidemic, with Britons living longer than Americans, according to an editorial published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Epidemiologist and population health expert Professor David Leon, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, analysed trends over the last 40 years, and found positive trends but also many unanswered questions.
His findings are in contrast to concerns that the obesity epidemic will stop life expectancy rising in the more well off countries.
“Despite what many may have assumed, and without being complacent, current trends in European life expectancy are in a positive direction,” he writes.
His analysis shows that over the last five years, for most European countries, life expectancy has been rising for the first time in decades, but there appears to be no closing of the gap between East and West.
In the UK and other Western European countries, life expectancy has been rising steadily, thanks mainly to a reduced rate of deaths from cardiovascular diseases.
Leon writes that the UK has seen “some of the largest and most rapid falls [in deaths from cardiovascular disease] of any Western European country, partly due to improvements in treatment as well as reductions in smoking and other risk factors.”
He also points out that having a high GDP and spending a lot on health does not necessarily secure a healthy population.
For example, despite having the highest per capita health spending in the world, in the US life expectancy lingers at the same level as the lowest of any Western European country (Portugal for men and Denmark for women).
According to figures for 2007, life expectancy in the UK was 80 years, compared to 78 for the US.
However, although the experience of Europe over the last 30 years highlights the important role that social, political and economic factors have played in improving health, “many intriguing and important questions remain unanswered about the drivers of these extraordinary trends”, writes Leon.
For example, it could be too soon to see the impact of increasing obesity rates: the effect of a generation that has been obese from childhood to adulthood has not yet had time to work through the figures.
Within Europe, Leon highlights the dramatic contrast between East and West as the former Communist countries struggle to catch up.
While the “Iron Curtain” was in place, it prevented progress in tackling non-communicable diseases in the Eastern bloc, and it was not until the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, that life expectancies in central European countries like Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic began their steady upward trends.
But, while these countries have been rising at a similar rate as Western Europe, they languish in a parallel trajectory, which makes the East-West gap “difficult to eliminate”, says Leon.
The up and down trends in Russia and other former Soviet countries in the last 25 years have been largely due to changes in drinking patterns among men, mostly, says Leon.
In 2008, the average Russian male could expect to live to 61.8 years, and the average Russian woman to 74.2; a sharp contrast to the UK, where life expectancy for men and women was 77.9 and 82.0 in the same year.
He suggests the recent rise in life expectancy in Russia is mainly due to a reduction in alcohol-related deaths rather than improvements in health as in the rest of Europe.
For his analysis, Leon uses mostly data from the World Health Organization (WHO) Health for All Database and the Human Mortality Database, which is produced by two teams from the USA and Germany, with financial backing and collaboration from other countries around the world.
“Trends in European life expectancy: a salutary view.”
David A Leon
Int. J. Epidemiol. dyr061 first published online 17 March 2011
DOI:10.1093/ije/dyr061
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (18 Mar 2011 press release).
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD