Differences in life expectancy between black people and white people vary from state to state, according to a new study published in the journal Health Affairs.

Share on Pinterest The differences between life expectancies for black people and white people indicate deeper social inequalities between races in the US.

“Prior studies in the United States have shown that, for the nation as a whole, the difference in life expectancy between blacks and whites has declined over the past 2 decades,” says Sam Harper, of the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics & Occupational Health in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

“What was not known was how individual states have fared in reducing this gap.”

Harper and colleagues wanted to see how different states have performed over the last 20 years. To do this, they used “novel statistical techniques,” data from death certificates and estimates of state populations to calculate life expectancies on a state-by-state basis.

Although Medical News Today did not have access to the full figures at time of publication, Harper says that some states had performed much better than others.

The state that by far showed the largest improvement in reducing the black-white gap was New York. Wisconsin, on the other hand, exhibited a widening gap in life expectancy between black and white people.

The team knows from previous work that fewer deaths from HIV/AIDS and homicide contributed to a boost in life expectancy in New York. Harper suggests that other states may benefit from a detailed study examining how the life expectancy gap in New York decreased so much.

“Other states with comparatively large black populations like California and Texas kept the national gap from closing more than it did,” Harper says.

“More generally, we found that states in the northeast made considerably more progress than states in the west for both men and women, but even within regions of the US there was a lot of heterogeneity among states,” he says.