Excess US deaths before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic

JAMA Health Forum

2025-05-23

(Press-News.org) About The Study: Between 1980 and 2023, the total number of excess U.S. deaths reached an estimated 14.7 million. Although excess deaths per year peaked in 2021, there were still more than 1.5 million during 2022 to 2023. In 2023, excess death rates remained substantially higher than pre-pandemic rates. The rising trend from 1980 to 2019 appears to have continued during and after the pandemic, likely reflecting pre-pandemic causes of death, including drug overdose, firearm injury, and cardiometabolic disease. These deaths highlight the continued consequences of U.S. health system inadequacies, economic inequality, and social and political determinants of health.

Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Jacob Bor, SD, email jbor@bu.edu.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2025.1118)

Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

# # #

Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2025.1118?utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_term=052325

About JAMA Health Forum: JAMA Health Forum is an international, peer-reviewed, online, open access journal that addresses health policy and strategies affecting medicine, health and health care. The journal publishes original research, evidence-based reports and opinion about national and global health policy; innovative approaches to health care delivery; and health care economics, access, quality, safety, equity and reform. Its distribution will be solely digital and all content will be freely available for anyone to read.

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Millions of HealthCare.gov participants face coverage loss due to burdensome reenrollment policies, according to new research

2025-05-23

PITTSBURGH, May 23, 2025 — Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, University of South Carolina and Emory University have published findings in JAMA Health Forum from a recent study on coverage retention and plan switching among Americans who obtain their health insurance through HealthCare.gov. Looking at data from 2022 through 2024, the authors found that losing the option to automatically reenroll into a zero-premium plan reduced enrollment. Reenrollment decreased by about 7% among those affected, indicating that an estimated quarter of a million Americans ...

Study: DNA test detects three times more lung pathogens than traditional methods

2025-05-23

A recent study on the application of Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) found that mNGS can achieve early detection of pathogens and accelerate the development of targeted anti-infection treatment plans, thereby improving treatment outcomes and patient prognosis. The research, conducted by the Department of Clinical Laboratory, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University and BGI Genomics, was published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology early in May. The mNGS Outperforms Traditional Methods Conventional microbiological tests (CMTs) rely ...

Modulation of antiviral response in fungi via RNA editing

2025-05-23

The expression of symptoms of viral infections is a byproduct of complex virus-host molecular pathways. These remain largely unknown, especially in the case of fungus-virus pathogen systems. Fungal antiviral responses involve three known mechanisms: RNA interference (RNAi), a post-transcriptional mechanism that inhibits viral replication; transcriptional reprogramming; and recognition of self versus non-self, which limits cell-to-cell transmission of viruses within fungi. While many fungal viruses (mycoviruses) cause asymptomatic infections in their hosts, the mechanisms ...

Global, regional, and national burden of nontraumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage

2025-05-23

About The Study: Although the global age-standardized burden rates of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) more than halved over the last 3 decades, SAH remained one of the most common cardiovascular and neurological causes of death and disabilities in the world, with increasing absolute case numbers. These findings suggest evidence for the potential health benefits of proactive public health planning and resource allocation toward the prevention of SAH. Nontraumatic SAH represents the third most common stroke type after ischemic stroke and intracerebral hemorrhage, accounting for 5% to ...

Earliest use of psychoactive and medicinal plant ‘harmal’ identified in Iron Age Arabia

2025-05-23

New research published in Communications Biology has uncovered the earliest known use of the medicinal and psychoactive plant Peganum harmala, commonly known as Syrian rue or harmal, in fumigation practices and inhaled as smoke. The findings offer unprecedented insight into early Arabian therapeutic and sensorial practices, revealing that native plants were already being deliberately used for their bioactive and psychoactive properties nearly 2,700 years ago. Led by Dr. Barbara Huber (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology) and Professor ...

Nano-scale biosensor lets scientists monitor molecules in real time

2025-05-23

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could continuously monitor the molecular state of our body? Consider the solutions that could enable, from optimized drug delivery to early detection of deadly diseases like cancer. For the last two decades, research has aimed to make this a reality by developing devices that measure a chemical or biological reaction in our bodies and send their measurements as a signal readable from outside the body. These devices, called biosensors, can now spot tiny molecules like drugs in real time, but they work only briefly. There is still no single reliable biosensor that can monitor many different substances in our bodies over long stretches. To address ...

Study shows how El Niño and La Niña climate swings threaten mangroves worldwide

2025-05-23

A new international study led by researchers at Tulane University shows that the El Niño and La Niña climate patterns affect nearly half of the world's mangrove forests, underscoring the vulnerability of these vital coastal ecosystems to climatic shifts. Mangroves are shrubs or trees that grow in dense thickets mainly in coastal saline or brackish water. The research, published in Nature Geoscience, is based on nearly two decades of satellite data from 2001 to 2020 and is the first study to demonstrate global-scale patterns in how El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences ...

Quantum eyes on energy loss: diamond quantum imaging for next-gen power electronics

2025-05-23

Improving energy conversion efficiency in power electronics is vital for a sustainable society, with wide-bandgap semiconductors like GaN and SiC power devices offering advantages due to their high-frequency capabilities. However, energy losses in passive components at high frequencies hinder efficiency and miniaturization. This underscores the need for advanced soft magnetic materials with lower energy losses. In a recent study published in Communications Materials, a research team led by Professor Mutsuko Hatano from the ...

Kyoto conundrum: More hotels than households exist in ancient capital

2025-05-23

While moderate touristification can bring economic benefits to cities, overtourism has adverse social effects on residents and visitors. To prevent this, it is necessary to understand the disrupted balance between tourist accommodations and residential housing. Junior Associate Professor Haruka Kato investigated the spatial patterns and geographic characteristics of tourism-accommodation hotspots in proximity to tourist locations in Kyoto, one of the most famous tourist cities in the world. In this study, the tourism-accommodation intensity index was calculated using the ratio of the number of accommodation rooms to that of households. The results revealed that ...

Cluster-root secretions improve phosphorus availability in low-phosphorus soil

2025-05-23

Plants require phosphorus to grow and survive. In environments with low levels of available soil phosphorus, plants need to adjust to stay alive. The pincushion hakea is a large woody, evergreen shrub native to southwestern Australia, an area that has amazingly low levels of soil phosphorus. This plant has adapted to these conditions by forming cluster roots—a large number of smaller rootlets extending from the root axis that resemble a bottlebrush—to extract the small amount of phosphorus in the soil. Cluster roots help plants in low-nutrient soils by increasing the amount of root surface area in contact with the soil, improving ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

New post-hoc analysis shows patients whose clinicians had access to GeneSight results for depression treatment are more likely to feel better sooner

Bimodal tactile tomography with bayesian sequential palpation for intracavitary microstructure profiling and segmentation

Disrupted connectivity of the brainstem ascending reticular activating system nuclei-left parahippocampal gyrus could reveal mechanisms of delirium following basal ganglia intracerebral hemorrhage

Cobalt single atom-phosphate functionalized reduced graphene oxide/perylenetetracarboxylic acid nanosheet heterojunctions for efficiently photocatalytic H2O2 production

[Press-News.org] Excess US deaths before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic
JAMA Health Forum