1

This is the hard data on incidence of specific diseases for the year 1995 and (projected) 2025. I have omitted chronic diseases as a group, although they are projected to increase from 90 million (1995) to 168 million by 2025.

The confluence of aggravators work too well together: quality of life, disposable income, percentage of those depressed, number of those with multimorbidities, and the fact that the incidence shows no signs of stopping.

We may be looking at a snowball effect: If the workforce is undergoing constant depletion and is being increasingly transformed into a burden, the economy will start to shrink, and this will hasten the process of depletion of the remaining workforce. Access to health care will begin to decrease, further hastening disintegration of health, economy and living standards.

I think it is abundantly clear looking at the chart below that life expectancy has no chance of increasing by 2025, but the question is how much will it decrease and how quickly?

And also: what forces exist to help mitigate the damage?

Incidence 1995-2025

Improve this question

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

You've asked how we might calculate (or rather, estimate) the life expectancy of people living in the US in 2025, and provided us with some data that could be relevant. It's understandable that you'd have trouble reflecting on this problem given only the figure included above; among other considerations, you don't have very much data, and the data you've been provided with doesn't seem to be as relevant to the question you're working on as you might like. More on the second consideration below:

The figure in the original question reports incidences of diseases in the US for 1995, but any method of using figures regarding reported incidences of disease to predict the US life expectancy would rely heavily on assumptions regarding how the (reported) incidence of a disease relates to the number of deaths caused by that disease. If you're interested in predicting the average American's life expectancy based on data regarding the death rates of certain diseases, the CDC has such historical data available in their National Vital Statistics Reports. You'll probably want to model things based on the death rates for certain causes, rather than the total number of deaths from such causes, even though both numbers are published in the reports on "Deaths: Final Data" linked above; this would take care of the fact that the US population hasn't historically been stagnant over time. Specifically, Table 11 on page 55 of the 1997 NVSS report, and Table 11 on page 46 of the 2014 NVSS report have these numbers; other tables in the said reports are often only for certain subsets of the population, or give the number of total deaths, instead of the death rate per 100,000 people.

If that sounds like too much work, it might be worth noticing that historical life expectancy tables by year for the US are widely available. I found a few relevant sources by searching for "life expectancy by year in the US" (and would add relevant links if I had the StackExchange reputation to do so).

Improve this answer
2
  • Deaths would be better, and deaths are inevitable given the disease load above. Perhaps a standard of 'years lost'. Either way it translates to decreased life expectancy. The data provided by CDC is often unreliable or skewed to make things appear 'better' than they are.
    – Fyor Nikowski
    Commented Feb 28, 2017 at 16:25
  • Also, t's easier to notice that people have non-fatal health problems when, as a country, you're spending more on checkups, screening & monitoring patients, etc. It's easier for people with actual problems to go undiagnosed if they're going to the doctor less often (which was the case in 1995 as compared to today). I agree that systematic biases like this, and like the sort of bias that might conceivably be born out of poor incentives the CDC, seem hard to explicitly adjust for in a principled way.
    – Casey
    Commented Mar 1, 2017 at 8:27
0

Well, to answer the question there may be many reasons playing into these causes. -Immigration: Some races are more prone than others statistically -Technology: With more access to technology people are more likely to grow up antisocial, and obese. -Age: The baby boomers all will be at least 60 by this time most of them even in their late 60s or 70s and they will make up a significant portion of the people getting disease like diabetes, arthritic, depression, cancer, obesity, etc. -Generational values: The teenagers of 2025 born 2007-2013 will have different values then teenagers growing up today(people born in the late 90s or early-mid 2000s) and it may be more acceptable for them to use different drugs like heroin which is becoming popular again unfortunately leading to autoimmune, depression. If they are growing up around people who are indoors constantly because of video games and I-pads they obviously will be more prone to health problems just by being sedentary and not getting enough sunlight. In fact, I would argue that in 2025 the healthiest group of people would be those born between 1975-2005, partly for that reason. -Population:The world population is going to be roughly 8 billion people in 2025, over 2 billion more since 1995 meaning more people with these problems. -Unknown causes: Some things like autism we don't know what causes it, but 1 in 15 people having autism in 2025 is damn near unbelievable. There may be other unexplained causes which may contribute to these problems, but I know I knocked at least 50 percent of them out for you. Hope this helped.

Improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.