Mississippi Residents Have the Lowest Healthy Life Expectancy at Age 65: CDC

A latest report in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly  states that residents of South irrespective of their race and blacks across the United States have lower healthy life expectancy at  65.

Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) is a population health measure that estimates the expected years of life at a given age in good health for people.

For this study, in order to calculate the HLEs by sex and race for 50 states and Washington D.C. for people aged 65, CDC worked on data from 2007-2009 from the National Vital Statistics Systems, U.S. Census Bureau, and Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.

"Where you live in the United States shouldn't determine how long and how healthy you live - but it does, far more than it should," said CDC director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H.  "Not only do people in certain states and African-Americans live shorter lives, they also live a greater proportion of their last years in poor health. It will be important moving forward to support prevention programs that make it easier for people to be healthy no matter where they live."

On evaluating the data they noticed that in Hawaii, for adults at 65, the highest HLE was 16.2 years and the lowest was observed in Mississippi that was 10.8 years. Evaluating on the basis of race showed that whites had the lowest HLE among Southern states and in blacks it was comparatively low throughout the Unites States, excluding in Nevada and New Mexico. In all states, females had a greater HLE than males with the difference ranging from 0.7 years in Louisiana to 3.1 years in North Dakota and South Dakota.

For males at age 65 HLW varied between a low of 10.1 years in Mississippi to a high of 15.0 years in Hawaii. Whereas in females of age 65 the HLE varied between a low of 11.4 years in Mississippi to a high of  17.3 years in Hawaii.