Declines in Adult Death Rates Lag in the South

U.S. states with the highest levels of adult death rates have become increasingly concentrated in the South, while the most improvement has been witnessed in Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast states, reports the Population Reference Bureau . A blog post by the National Institute on Aging's (NIA) John Haaga elaborates on these regional patterns and encourages researchers to explore the underlying causes. "States in the Southern, Appalachian, and Old Midwest regions have been doing poorly," Haaga writes. "This problem predates the opioid epidemic, having persisted for decades, through multiple presidential administrations, health policy changes, and changes of power in Congress and in state legislatures. Older people in West Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Alabama had relatively poor health in 1980 and have seen almost no improvement since then for women and very little for men." This project was underwritten by the NIA Division of Behavioral and Social Research, via a grant from the University of Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging. The center coordinates dissemination of findings from the NIA demography centers located in academic institutions throughout the U.S.