State policies in eight different policy domains, including gun safety, labor and tobacco, are associated with U.S. working-age mortality, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jennifer Karas Montez of Syracuse University, U.S., and colleagues. They note that more conservative state policies were generally associated with higher mortality.
Americans die younger than people in most other high-income countries and within the United States life expectancy differs markedly across geographic areas. In 2019, it ranged from 74.4 years in Mississippi to 80.9 years in Hawaii.
In the new work, the researchers used data from the 1999–2019 National Vital Statistics System to calculate state-level age-adjusted mortality rates for deaths from all causes and from cardiovascular disease (CVD), alcohol, suicide and drug poisoning among adults ages 25 to 64. They merged that data with annual…