A soybean farmer in Mississippi County, Arkansas.
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If you were born in the South, chances are you have a shorter life expectancy compared to the rest of the United States, according to recently released data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday.
The findings, published by the National Vital Statistics Reports, examined state-level mortality and population estimates as of 2018, as well as state-specific deaths and population numbers for older Medicare beneficiaries that year.
The CDC found that Americans are expected to live to be 78.7 years old at birth, although women are more likely to outlive men for 5 years across the country, according to the report. States in the South fared worse compared to their Northeast and Western counterparts.
West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, South Carolina and Missouri, all ranked in the bottom ten states for life expectancy, the CDC found. West Virginia, which had a life expectancy of 74.4 years, was the lowest for both men and women.
“With a few exceptions, the states with the largest sex differences are those with lower life expectancy at birth, while the smallest sex differences are mostly found between states with higher life expectancy,” CDC researchers wrote in the report.
Meanwhile, Hawaii took the top spot for the state with the highest life expectancy at 81 years. Aloha state was followed by California, New York, Minnesota, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, New Jersey and Rhode Island to round out the top ten states where you will live the longest.
The latest life expectancy figures from the CDC come just under a month after the agency released a preliminary report in February that found life expectancy during the pandemic fell by a year in the first half of 2020 – the largest drop since the WWII.
According to that report, the CDC predicted life expectancy for Americans at birth by 2020 at 77.8 years.
– Reuters contributed to this report.