(Press-News.org)
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Comparing wealth and survival rates in the U.S. with those in Europe, researchers found that over a 10-year period, Americans across all wealth levels were more likely to die than their European counterparts.
The findings were detailed in a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine by a team led by researchers at the Brown University School of Public Health.
The analysis compared data from more than 73,000 adults in the U.S. and different regions of Europe who were age 50 to 85 in 2010 to determine how wealth affects a person’s chances of dying. The results revealed that people with more wealth tend to live longer than those with less wealth, especially in the U.S., where the gap between the rich and poor is much larger than in Europe.
Comparison data also showed that at every wealth level in the U.S., mortality rates were higher than those in the parts of Europe the researchers studied. The nation’s wealthiest Americans have shorter lifespans on average than the wealthiest Europeans; in some cases, the wealthiest Americans have survival rates on par with the poorest Europeans in western parts of Europe such as Germany, France and the Netherlands.
U.S. life expectancy has been declining in recent years, said study author Irene Papanicolas, a professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown. The study provides a more detailed picture of life expectancy across demographics in the U.S. compared to different parts of Europe, she said.
"The findings are a stark reminder that even the wealthiest Americans are not shielded from the systemic issues in the U.S. contributing to lower life expectancy, such as economic inequality or risk factors like stress, diet or environmental hazards,” said Papanicolas, who directs the School of Public Health’s Center for Health System Sustainability. “If we want to improve health in the U.S., we need to better understand the underlying factors that contribute to these differences — particularly amongst similar socioeconomic groups — and why they translate to different health outcomes across nations.”
According to the study, individuals in the wealthiest quartile had a death rate that is 40% lower than for individuals in the poorest quartile. Individuals in Continental Europe died at rates approximately 40% lower than participants in the U.S. throughout the study period. Participants from Southern Europe had estimated death rates around 30% lower than U.S. participants over the study period, while participants from Eastern Europe have estimated death rates 13% to 20% lower.
“We found that where you stand in your country’s wealth distribution matters for your longevity, and where you stand in your country compared to where others stand in theirs matters, too” said study author Sara Machado, a research scientist at Brown’s Center for Health System Sustainability. “Fixing health outcomes is not just a challenge for the most vulnerable — even those in the top quartile of wealth are affected.”
The study, which analyzed data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study and Europe’s Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement, underscores how weaker social safety nets and structural disparities in the U.S. may contribute to poorer survival rates across all wealth groups. These shortcomings disproportionately affect the poorest residents but ultimately leave even the wealthiest Americans more vulnerable than their European counterparts, the researchers argued.
The study noted how systemic cultural and behavioral factors, such as diet, smoking and social mobility, may also play a role. For example, smoking rates and living in rural areas — both linked to poorer health — were more common in the U.S.
The researchers also highlighted a “survivor effect” in the U.S., where poorer individuals with worse health outcomes were more likely to die earlier, leaving behind a population that is healthier and wealthier as age groups progress. This creates the illusion that wealth inequality decreases over time, when in reality it’s partly due to the early deaths of the poorest Americans.
“Our previous work has shown that while wealth inequality narrows after 65 across the U.S. and Europe, in the U.S. it narrows because the poorest Americans die sooner and in greater proportion,” Papanicolas said.
The researchers said the findings provide a sobering view of U.S. health outcomes and a call to action for policymakers to address a growing wealth-mortality gap with policies that have a broader focus than the health system’s shortcomings.
“If you look at other countries, there are better outcomes, and that means we can learn from them and improve," Machado said. “It’s not necessarily about spending more — it’s about addressing the factors we’re overlooking, which could deliver far greater benefits than we realize.”
END
At only two days old, Sophie was losing too much weight, and too quicky.
Further genetic testing would show that Sophie has one of a group of rare conditions called CODE (congenital diarrhea and enteropathies) that disrupts the function of cells in the intestine, causing diarrhea and preventing infants from absorbing the nutrients they need to grow and thrive. For Sophie’s parents, Samantha and Kyle, this meant a complete re-envisioning of the life they had expected as a family.
“Suddenly, our days were filled with medical treatments and frequent hospital visits, requiring us to adjust to being not ...
People living in Bronze Age-era Denmark may have been able to travel to Norway directly over the open sea, according to a study published April 2, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Boel Bengtsson from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and colleagues. To complete this study, the research team developed a new computer modeling tool that could help other scientists better understand how ancient peoples traversed the sea.
The Bronze Age cultures of what are now northern Denmark and southwestern Norway are quite alike, with similar ...
Technology can improve on existing platforms’ sensitivity and speed by 20 times
Microcantilevers coated in specific antibodies exhibited very high affinity for corresponding HIV antigens
Platform could bring cost-effective HIV testing to remote settings where lab-based testing is impractical
EVANSTON, Ill. --- A team of Northwestern University scientists spanning disciplines have developed new technology that could lead to the creation of a rapid point-of-care test for HIV infection competitive with traditional lab-based HIV ...
Nearly 16 million American adults have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but evidence suggests that more than 30 percent of them don’t respond well to stimulant medications like Ritalin and Adderall. A new clinical trial provides a surprising explanation for why this may be the case: There are individual differences in how our brains circuits are wired, including the chemical circuits responsible for memory and concentration, according to a new study co-led by the ...
MINNEAPOLIS — Cervical artery dissection is a tear in an artery in the neck that provides blood flow to the brain. Such a tear can result in blood clots that cause stroke. A new study has found almost a five-fold increase in the number of U.S. hospitalizations for cervical artery dissection over a 15-year period. The study is published on April 2, 2025, online in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN).
A dissection in the artery wall is most often caused by trauma due to motor vehicle accidents but can also occur with smaller ...
For the first time researchers demonstrate in an animal how heavy alcohol use leads to long-term behavioral issues by damaging brain circuits critical for decision-making.
Rats exposed to high amounts of alcohol exhibited poor decision-making during a complex task even after a monthslong withdrawal period. Key areas of their brains had undergone dramatic functional changes compared to healthy rats.
The findings, published today in Science Advances, provide a new explanation of alcohol’s long-term effects on cognition.
“We now have a new model for the unfortunate cognitive changes that humans with alcohol use disorder show,” said ...
Patients prescribed medicinal cannabis in Australia maintained improvements in overall health-related quality of life (HRQL), fatigue, and sleep disturbance across a one-year period, according to a study published April 2, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Margaret-Ann Tait from The University of Sydney, Australia, and colleagues. Anxiety, depression, insomnia, and pain also improved over time for those with corresponding health conditions.
Research into the therapeutic benefits of medicinal cannabis has increased since the discovery of the analgesic properties in cannabis plant compounds. In 2016, advocacy groups lobbied the Australian government to ...
In a small study of eight cats at early stages of pregnancy, researchers detected 19 different kinds of microplastic particles in fetuses from two cats and in the placentas of three cats. Ilaria Ferraboschi of the University of Parma, Italy, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on April 2, 2025.
Humans and other animals worldwide are increasingly exposed to microplastics, which are small particles of plastic contaminants. Studies suggest that microplastics can have a variety of adverse health effects. For instance, research in rodents suggests that fetuses exposed to microplastics ...
Dozens of amphibians perished together on an ancient floodplain around 230 million years ago, according to a study published April 2, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Aaron M. Kufner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S., and colleagues.
Early in the Age of Dinosaurs, alligator-sized amphibians called metoposaurid temnospondyls were common in freshwater habitats. Several fossil sites contain large concentrations of temnospondyls buried together, but determining how these bonebeds formed is often difficult due to ...
Article URL: https://plos.io/4hxJYYP
Article title: First unambiguous record of pneumaticity in the axial skeleton of alvarezsaurians (Theropoda: Coelurosauria)
Author countries: Argentina, China
Funding: We thank P. Chafrat from Museo Patagónico de Ciencias Naturales, General Roca, Río Negro Province, Argentina. The authors gratefully acknowledge "Fundacion Patagonica de Ciencias Naturales" and "Sanatorio Juan XXIII" for making the CT images possible. MP was supported by the Faculty of Science of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. We thank Hans-Dieter Sues, an anonymous reviewer, and the editorial team of PLOS ONE for their comments ...
