点击显示 收起
March 16, 2007 --The life expectancy gap between blacks and whites in the U.S. has narrowed, indicating progress in stemming health disparities between the races, a new study concludes.
The report, to be published in The Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday, shows that white men lived on average 6.33 years longer than black men in 2003, down from the 8.44-year difference a decade before.
The racial difference among women dropped from 5.6 years to 4.5 years over the same time period.
Overall, life expectancy at birth was 78 years for whites and 72.7 years for blacks in 2003, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The narrowing gap between blacks and whites followed a period of sharp increases between about 1984 and 1990, largely due to rising violent homicides and the emergence of HIV/AIDS. Both causes of death disproportionately affect blacks.
But those causes of death dropped after 1993, helping erase some of the disparity between the two races, the study concludes.
Widespread use of antiretroviral drugs accounts for the large drop in AIDS deaths among black men and women, says Sam Harper, PhD, one of the study's authors.
Black men also benefited from a decline in accidental deaths and violent homicides, which could both result from economic improvement.
"We don't want to suggest everything is improving," Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal, tells WebMD. "But we made some progress, and there's far more distance to go."
Researchers have also seen a drop in heart disease deaths among women, a trend that has benefited black women in particular, Harper says. More widespread use of blood pressure and cholesterol-lowering drugs, and greater disease awareness among women, are thought to be root causes.
There has been no corresponding drop in heart disease deaths among men, however.
And black men and women both remain more likely to die of heart disease than whites. The difference is so large that it accounts for at least 30% of the remaining difference in life expectancy between the races, Harper says.
"That's an area we need to keep focusing prevention and treatment on," he says.
Georges Benjamin, MD, executive director of the American Public Health Association, says the study was "mostly good news."
"The question for me is, can we sustain that," he tells WebMD. Benjamin warns that crime and homicide trends tend to be cyclical, and the racial gap in life expectancy could widen again if economic conditions deteriorate.
Benjamin says he considers infant mortality rates the most sensitive indicator of social and economic conditions between the races.
In 2003, blacks had an infant mortality rate of 14.01 per 1,000 births, vs. 5.72 per 1,000 births for whites.