Life expectancy in the US increased by about a month to 78.7 years in 2018, federal health officials reported on Thursday. The increase reverses an alarming — and unprecedented — drop for the past three years in the vital measure of national health.



Around 2.8 million people died in the US in 2018. US life expectancy in that year was still below its 2014 peak of 78.9 years, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Falling heart disease and cancer death rates, the two leading causes of death, as well as a 4% decrease in drug overdose deaths, the first such drop in 28 years, appear to have arrested the decline in life expectancy seen since 2014.

"This news is a real victory," HHS Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement. "The drop in overdose deaths shows that the President’s new level of focus on the opioid crisis, and the administration’s science- and community-based efforts to combat it, are beginning to make a significant difference."

Death rates increased in 2018 for only 2 of the 10 leading causes of death, suicide and influenza, the NCHS report noted, coming after a severe flu season that winter.

“We should be cautiously optimistic,” Regina LaBelle of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law Georgetown University Law Center told BuzzFeed News. “Optimistic because it appears that life expectancy didn't decrease again and overdose deaths are down slightly. But cautious because this is a one year snapshot of a moving picture.”

Both the decline in cancer death rates, linked to decreasing rates of smoking, and fewer overdoses, following a nationwide expansion in drug treatment, point to the importance of long-term prevention efforts, LaBelle noted.

But LaBelle and other experts also pointed to the unevenness of the gains: While drug overdoses dropped in 14 states and the District of Columbia, they continued to increase in California, Delaware, Missouri, New Jersey, and South Carolina.

In the big picture, US life expectancy has been stagnating since 2010 despite small fluctuations, sociologist Francesco Acciai of Arizona State University told BuzzFeed News. In the 2000s, in contrast, US life expectancy had steadily increased by 1.7 years. "Whether the small increase of 2018 will be the beginning of a new period of growth or another fluctuation of a decade-long flat trend, only time will tell," he said.