Is there a way to measure “Life expectancy of people most similar to you”?
Seems like that would be a more meaningful metric for an individual, rather than lumping them in with every drug addict.
Seems like that would be a more meaningful metric for an individual, rather than lumping them in with every drug addict.
Wow.. whenever someone asks me why the US doesn't have humane social services and still regards drug addiction as a crime in need of punishment, I'll point them to this comment.
We already serve up content based on people similar to you or making similar choices as you, why not health forecasts?
If I eat healthy, exercise, get the proper amount of sleep and am not addicted to drugs, why not show me how other people with similar habits as me are doing, instead of averaging in people who treat their body like a dumpster?
Showing me the life expectancy averaged across an entire country of 300 million doesn't motivate me to do anything. There is nothing I can do that will make any impact on that number. By this logic we should show life expectancy as the average of the entire planet, that would be the best wouldn't it? No.
Showing people an accurate life expectancy however, could motivate them to make changes to their lifestyle or stay the course if they are happy with it.
I don't know, maybe people just have negative knee-jerk reactions to anyone proposing individualist sentiments.
This is not the point of life expectancy statistics. It's not to motivate people. And It's not about you. Just because you're thinking it's about you and that it's not relevant to you to be put in the same bucket with others proves my point.
This is an intentionally nation-scale barometer which is used to asses the Human Development Index. It's more tied with Income inequality than with your diet and exercise regimen.
Life expectancy if you get the surgery and medicate with pot: 80 years.
Life expectancy if you get the surgery and use the opioids: 60 years.
That seems immeasurably more useful than a national average alone which only can be used for political talking points.
So you won't find them for all the options of interest, and you emphatically won't find them for emerging options (including pot, which hasn't been even quasi-legal long enough to support good data.)
It's a reasonable question. Is there life expectancy data for different segments of the population?
Age, sex, and socioeconomic status dominate.
There are a number of conditions linked to genetics -- types of anemia, heart disease, Tay-Sachs syndrome, off the top of my head.
Environmental exposures map strongly to socioeconomic status, though there are of course regional variations.
Weight, "body mass index" (a horrible measure), body fat percentage (far more useful, but harder to obtain), and various specific exposures and behaviours will cover much else: drink, smokes, injectable drugs, unprotected sex, other high-risk activity.
This is pretty much the life work of epidemiologists, public health statisticians, and actuaries.
We can have a medical break through that lets us revive stroke victims as brain dead patients that live for years in beds. Simultaneously we can have a smaller opioid epidemic that kills fewer people than the stroke victims and makes way more addicts. Average life expectancy increased, but who really gives a crap in that case?
Sure, to some degree of similarity, if you want to spend effort analyzing the multidimensional demographic and other factors in mortality data; there's very little public policy value in that, so the public organizations that compile public health information to support policy aren't likely to package that up for you, though.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db293.htm
I wouldn't be that surprised if they also sliced out "substance abuse", because mortality of the using population is likely a useful metric in characterizing the problem.
That's incredibly myopic and would point to a massively flawed system if that's true. It's incredibly valuable for public policy on both ends of the political spectrum to know if certain demographics are dying much sooner than others.
A single national average is about as useless as you can get unless your goal is to bemoan the decline of the US or highlight how much better one nation is than another.