ArticleJournal of health and social behavior2019
Weathering, Drugs, and Whack-a-Mole: Fundamental and Proximate Causes of Widening Educational Inequity in U.S. Life Expectancy by Sex and Race, 1990-2015.
Article in Journal of health and social behavior, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatiotemporal Modeling of Premature Mortality in Mississippi: A County-Level Analysis of Years of Potential Life Lost, 2015-2025.Preventing chronic disease · 2026Article
- Heterogeneity in Asian Americans' mortality trends, 2000-2022.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2026Article
- Peripheral Artery Disease: New Concepts, Treatments, and Disparities.Annual review of medicine · 2026Review
- The Gender Gap in Life Expectancy in the United States and Deaths of Despair: Trends from 1979 to 2022.Population and development review · 2025Article
- Education, health-based selection, and the widening mortality gap between Americans with and without a 4-year college degree.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Increasing Educational Inequality in Biological Aging Among U.S. Adults Aged 50-79 From 1988-1994 to 2015-2018.Demography · 2025Article
- Long-term Economic Distress and Growing Educational Inequity in Life Expectancy.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Understanding the demographics of the opioid overdose death crisis.Journal of population economics · 2025Article
- "Deaths of despair" over the business cycle: New estimates from a shift-share instrumental variables approach.Economics and human biology · 2024Article
- Reevaluating the "deaths of despair" narrative: Racial/ethnic heterogeneity in the trend of psychological distress-related death.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Native American "deaths of despair" and economic conditions.Research in social stratification and mobility · 2024Article
- Review
- Poverty Status at Birth Predicts Epigenetic Changes at Age 15.Journal of biomedical and life sciences · 2024Article
- Race, Poverty Status at Birth, and DNA Methylation of Youth at Age 15.Global journal of epidemiology and infectious disease · 2024Article
- Trends in cause-specific mortality: deaths of despair in Spain, 1980-2019.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
- Something Related to Education May Hold the Key to Understanding What Is Ailing the United States.American journal of public health · 2023Article
- Predicting U.S. county opioid poisoning mortality from multi-modal social media and psychological self-report data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Dynamic Changes in the Association Between Education and Health in the United States.The Milbank quarterly · 2023Review
- Life Expectancy Gaps Among Black and White Persons and Contributing Causes of Death in 3 Large US Cities, 2018-2019.JAMA network open · 2023Article
- Longitudinal associations between allostatic load, pet ownership, and socioeconomic position among U.S. adults aged 50.SSM - population health · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Discussion of growing inequity in U.S. life expectancy increasingly focuses on the popularized narrative that it is driven by a surge of "deaths of despair." Does this narrative fit the empirical evidence? Using census and Vital Statistics data, we apply life-table methods to calculate cause-specific years of life lost between ages 25 and 84 by sex and educational rank for non-Hispanic blacks and whites in 1990 and 2015. Drug overdoses do contribute importantly to widening inequity for whites, especially men, but trivially for blacks. The contribution of suicide to growing inequity is unremarkable. Cardiovascular disease, non-lung cancers, and other internal causes are key to explaining growing life expectancy inequity. Results underline the speculative nature of attempts to attribute trends in life-expectancy inequity to an epidemic of despair. They call for continued investigation of the possible weathering effects of tenacious high-effort coping with chronic stressors on the health of marginalized populations.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.