ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Quantifying and explaining variation in life expectancy at census tract, county, and state levels in the United States.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond Composite Indices: Comprehensive Social Determinants Improve Heart Failure Readmission Prediction.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2026Article
- Age-specific life expectancies across school districts in the United States: Applying a population weighted geographic crosswalk to aggregate census tract indicators.SSM - population health · 2026Article
- Spatial Social Polarization and Cardiometabolic Disease Prevalence and Incidence: What Is the Role of the Neighborhood Environment?Journal of health and social behavior · 2026Article
- Local government expenditure centralization and spatial variation in working-age mortality.SSM - population health · 2025Article
- Where Does the Black-White Life Expectancy Gap Come From? The Deadly Consequences of Residential Segregation.Population and development review · 2024Article
- A tale of many neighborhoods: Latent profile analysis to derive a national neighborhood typology for the US.Health & place · 2024Article
- The Ecology of Economic Distress and Life Expectancy.International journal of public health · 2024Article
- Structural Factors and Racial/Ethnic Inequities in Travel Times to Acute Care Hospitals in the Rural US South, 2007-2018.The Milbank quarterly · 2023Article
- Association between Low Urban Neighborhood Greenness and Hypertensive Disorders of Pregnancy.American journal of perinatology · 2023Article
- The Association Between Census Tract Healthy Food Accessibility and Life Expectancy in the United States.Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine · 2023Article
- Life Expectancy and Built Environments in the U.S.: A Multilevel Analysis.American journal of preventive medicine · 2023Article
- Preterm birth in historically redlined neighborhoods-spatial analysis with individual and community level factors.Journal of perinatology : official journal of the California Perinatal Association · 2023Article
- Heterogeneity in Disparities in Life Expectancy Across US Metropolitan Areas.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2022Article
- Investigating Health Disparities Associated With Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children After SARS-CoV-2 Infection.The Pediatric infectious disease journal · 2022Article
- Association of Neighborhood Conditions and Resources for Children With Life Expectancy at Birth in the US.JAMA network open · 2022Article
- Article
- Structural competency in emergency medical education: A scoping review and operational framework.AEM education and training · 2022Article
- Air Pollution, Socioeconomic Status, and Age-Specific Mortality Risk in the United States.JAMA network open · 2022Article
- Quantifying within-city inequalities in child mortality across neighbourhoods in Accra, Ghana: a Bayesian spatial analysis.BMJ open · 2022Article
- How the world's collective attention is being paid to a pandemic: COVID-19 related n-gram time series for 24 languages on Twitter.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Studies on geographic inequalities in life expectancy in the United States have exclusively focused on single-level analyses of aggregated data at state or county level. This study develops a multilevel perspective to understanding variation in life expectancy by simultaneously modeling the geographic variation at the levels of census tracts (CTs), counties, and states. We analyzed data from 65,662 CTs, nested within 3,020 counties and 48 states (plus District of Columbia). The dependent variable was age-specific life expectancy observed in each of the CTs. We also considered the following CT-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics as independent variables: population density; proportions of population who are black, who are single parents, who are below the federal poverty line, and who are aged 25 or older who have a bachelor's degree or higher; and median household income. Of the total geographic variation in life expectancy at birth, 70.4% of the variation was attributed to CTs, followed by 19.0% for states and 10.7% for counties. The relative importance of CTs was greater for life expectancy at older ages (70.4 to 96.8%). The CT-level independent variables explained 5 to 76.6% of between-state variation, 11.1 to 58.6% of between-county variation, and 0.7 to 44.9% of between-CT variation in life expectancy across different age groups. Our findings indicate that population inequalities in longevity in the United States are primarily a local phenomenon. There is a need for greater precision and targeting of local geographies in public policy discourse aimed at reducing health inequalities in the United States.
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